


Tips for a successful family vacation

by LordReborn



Category: Boruto: Naruto Next Generations, Naruto
Genre: Action/Adventure, Canon Compliant, F/M, Family Shenanigans, SasuSaku Month 2020, ss month 2020, uchiha family adventures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-29
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:33:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 75,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25183327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LordReborn/pseuds/LordReborn
Summary: It was supposed to be a clean cut mission: keep the package secure (her mother) and deliver it to the various hospitals that need her help (many,manyvillages around the continent).Uncle Naruto said it, papa said it, mama said it.And Sarada had to open her big mouth and wish for it out loud.
Relationships: Haruno Sakura & Uchiha Sasuke, Haruno Sakura/Uchiha Sasuke
Comments: 85
Kudos: 183





	1. Day 1

* * *

**_Sarada's tip:_ ** _Don't overdo it on the first day fresh out of the village or you will look like an amateur._

_But if you do - pack plenty of snacks._

* * *

It all went to hell in a minute.

Sarada watches the small scale revolution currently happening inside her home with a healthy dose of disdain, so characteristic of the Uchiha family. Her large eyes are narrowed behind her red rimmed glasses, though she resolutely follows her parents’ hurried movements inside the living room.

Her mother is in the throes of organizing a throw-away bag with whatever food there is left in the fridge, so the kitchen counter is packed full of perishables and non-perishables sorted into groups.

Sarada’s eyes slide critically away from her mother’s frenzied movements to where her father sits at the dining room table, as calm and composed as ever. He has appropriated the whole table and transformed it into a makeshift armoury. Dozens of kunai, shuriken and stacks of paper bombs are scattered over the wooden surface, glinting threateningly under the low light of the bulb overhead while her father works on his blade. Sarada watches his slow, fluid movements, eyes trained on him as he patiently works through the repetitive routine and she absently bites down a violent yawn.

All of this still feels like a hazy dream or a particularly tedious genjutsu that needs dispelling, but all proof points to this strange scene as being real. Woken up at an unbelievable _three_ in the morning, Sarada has had to watch her parents for half an hour while her mother struggled to put the last pieces of their home in order and her father decided that an inventory of their weaponry is imminent right _then_.

They should have had the decency to let her sleep in, especially because she was done with her own packing _way_ before either of them.

“Sarada, can you please take this to auntie Hachiko’s house?”

Her mother illustrates the very reason why Sarada was currently sitting on one arm of the couch, her right leg dangling above the floor. Sakura pushes the heavy pack filled with food purposefully in the door’s direction and Sarada sighs.

As if it’s not bad enough that she has to keep her eyes peeled open at four in the morning, now she has to traipse around the village too.

With a mighty sigh, Sarada slips away from her perch and pads to the pack, placed where the living room melts into the kitchen. He glances to her father once, but he is too preoccupied with sharpening a set of kunai before dropping them into a bucket which oozes a reddish steam that dissipates before it reaches the ceiling. Her mother’s set then.

Her father prefers to aim his deadly sharp kunai with impeccable accuracy at people’s throats and Sarada is not yet adept enough to use poisoned kunai as a primary weapon, not that anyone lets her anyway. Between her mother insisting that she is still a genin and is prone to fumbling with her weapons and her father’s strong opinions that only people who know how to make poisons can use them on their weapons, Sarada has no chance of holding her own deadly weapons with an added surprise any time soon.

On the way out the door, she has to zigzag between more cardboard boxes, her mother’s travelling bag and her bulging medpack filled with probably half the hospital inventory. The last item to stand bravely in her way is her father’s black travel bag and Sarada shoves it aside with one foot and a petty amount of satisfaction.

She barely has time to look up before a hand is there to steady and prevent her from tumbling headfirst into a tall body. Sarada looks up to the person who dares visit at such an ungodly hour and finds the Seventh Hokage, a small grin over his lips, though the expression on his face is tired and there are deep purple circles under his eyes.

“Lord Seventh!” Sarada squeaks and takes a step back.

Naruto releases her shoulder and scrunches his nose up in a painfully familiar way Sarada has seen time and time again since she can remember.

“Please don’t call me that so early in the morning, Sarada!“ Her uncle whines and steps fully inside the apartment. His cloak is bunched up and draped over his bandaged arm and his jacket is open to reveal a plain white t-shirt. 

Sarada watches, speechless, as Naruto closes the door with his other hand and starts wrestling his sandals off, mind whirling with important questions, but her mouth too tightly clamped shut with sleep to voice any of them.

“Naruto?” Her mother’s head pops out from the hallway leading to the washroom, pleasantly surprised by the unexpected visit. “What are you doing here so early?”

Sarada hears her father’s arid sigh from the other end of the room and subtly rolls her eyes at his obvious displeasure at seeing his best friend.

“Don’t you ever sleep, dobe?”

Naruto bites back a grin as he takes his first step inside the house proper.

“Less and less lately.” He makes a beeline for the table cluttered with weapons but stops about halfway inside and turns to Sarada. “Ah, I can take that to the auntie, Sarada. Just leave it there so I don’t forget it when I leave.”

Sarada looks to her mother first for confirmation and when she gets the silent okay, she carefully sets the package down and makes her way back inside.

Naruto is already lounging in a chair, opposite her father.

Sasuke simply continues on with the weapons while her mother uses the last vestiges of a package of green tea to make a pot of tea. Sarada takes the seat next to her uncle for several undisclosed reasons such as the fact that her father has been grouchy all morning – which is his fault, because he decided they should leave well before any self-respecting citizen would fall out of the bed – and also because Sarada likes the unbridled warmth radiating off of Naruto, even at his most tired. Then there is also the fact that Sasuke’s sword was propped over the back of the chair next to him.

“You guys ready to go then?” Naruto asks rather lamely, fishing for a subject of conversation while he looks for a good reason for his sudden appearance.

In reality, all Naruto really came here to do was see his best friends off. It’s been a long time since he’s had none of them by his side and even knowing that they were somewhere in the village was often enough to assuage his worries. But now they were leaving, like they did so many years ago, even if it was on official business. As much as Naruto had been exalted for them both, he had still felt their absence keenly. And now they were taking the youngest Uchiha with them.

Sarada waits for any of her parents to answer, but the ridiculous silence stretches long into awkward territory. She has to bite her lip at her poor uncle’s face, dripping with sweat and still plastered into a stiff smile that her father shoots a contemptuous glare towards. Her mother on the other hand fights back a bout of laughter, that much is clear.

The tea is served, and Sakura finally takes pity on her blonde friend.

“Yes, we are all ready.” Her mother moves the sword to the floor and slips in the only free seat left. “I don’t know why, but it was harder to pack everything up than I remember it being.”

Naruto chuckles, hands going to rest behind his head. “That’s ‘cause we didn’t really stay for too long at home before.”

Her mother bites her lower lip but nods, hands crossing over her chest. Sarada eyes her father, unruffled still by the discussion, though she knew he would be. Between them all, he’s the most used to travelling in and out of the village. Her mother has taken less and less missions outside the village ever since Sarada was born. They stopped altogether when Sarada was young and only in the last few years has her mother left on any shinobi job and those were mostly relief missions for unfortunate villages that had taken a bad blow from nature. Sarada herself has only started her life as a genin and has only taken a few missions outside the village, but never ventured outside the border of the Land of Fire. Until now that is.

Upon her mother’s rapidly rising reputation as one of the best medics in the five great nations and the smaller countries dotting the continent, and with Sarada finally old enough to take care of herself if the need arises, Sakura has decided to open her ears again to the plethora of invitations from basically every self-respecting state. Her mother was invited to conferences, and hospitals and research centers to share her ideas and studies with the population at large.

The string of requests was staggering and overwhelming, but Sarada’s aunt Tsunade proclaimed that she will help put an order to the madness while her mother was slumped with her usual load of work at both the hospital and the clinic. Lady Fifth enlisted uncle Kakashi as her aide – much to the man’s chagrin – and used the opportunity to exercise an ounce of her former authority onto this daunting task. Sarada happened upon them one evening and has been an accomplice ever since.

It took the better part of three months of hard work, but her mother was presented with a crowded schedule that would bring her on a tour of the major five villages and five capitals in the smaller countries on their way there.

The amount of excitement and trepidation the itinerary received once it had Sakura’s stamp of approval was quickly overshadowed by local logistical problems. For one, Sasuke was torn between decisions – he wanted to accompany his wife no matter what, but he couldn’t in good conscience leave Sarada behind in the village for such a long time. The tour will take two months, and this is from an optimistic point of view. Sasuke estimated it to be somewhere between three or four months, depending on what happens on the road.

So used to at least one of her parents being home, one part of Sarada jumped with joy at being left to her own devices while the other part of her balked at the idea of keeping up to her mother’s expectations and her father’s high regard of order inside the house while also balancing the usual D-rank missions she gets with her team. She was not intimidated, though she shouldn’t have bothered getting worked up over something like this anyway.

The thing is – when both of your parents are shinobi on active duty, high-ranking enough, esteemed through Konoha’s upper echelons and best friends with all three living embodiments of the Hokage title, asking for permission to take your daughter out on a family trip is just a bothersome formality. Lord Seventh approved both letters of recommendation the same day he received them, though that could also be a cause of Sasuke glaring straight into Naruto’s soul and her mother promising many wordless threats with her wide smile. 

In a jiffy, Sarada found herself sandwiched in a team of two jonin ranked shinobi that also happened to be her parents, and prepared to be shipped away all over the continent. If at first she wasn’t quite sure whether she was more frustrated at her banned freedom or angry that her parents didn’t think she’d be able to take care of herself, those nefarious thoughts quickly transformed into giddy excitement when two precious words registered through the haze of irritation – _family vacation._

That is how her mother had first described the A-rank mission Sarada and her father were registered under, with orders to act as a guard detail to her mother for the duration of her travels. _Family vacation_ sounded better and much, _much_ more fun.

Which is why, up until she had to wake up at three in the morning, Sarada was anxious to get on the road already, thirsting for adventure and unmitigated time with both of her parents. She doesn’t harbour any illusions that this mission will also give her parents some precious time for themselves and Sarada plans on swiftly evacuating whatever premises they will occupy to explore every village they stayed in.

Having a medic for a mother brings enough nightmare material, but it also brings clarity and Sarada was always too smart for her own good. She is also her mother’s daughter and Sakura is frequently liberal in her leery accusations whenever her friends are around. Sarada is just too talented not to notice and nowadays she finds that teasing her mother is just hilarious, which always prompts auntie Ino to shake her head in quiet resignation over their antics.

“Man, I’m gonna miss you guys!” Naruto’s short-handed declaration is spoken with a dram of complaint and it is enough to startle Sarada out of her long string of thoughts. “Can’t believe you’re leaving me to face the world all alone!”

She raises her head and returns her uncle’s smile.

Sasuke snorts softly as he starts gathering the weapons laid on the table and places them inside three different pouches with precise movements of his arm.

The room fills with her mother’s laughter as she moves away from the table and towards the stairs. On the way she pauses to pat Naruto’s shoulder with good-natured humour, though the man winces a little from the force of it.

“I’m sure you can handle yourself while we’re away.” Sarada’s father drawls the statement with his usual boredom marking every other syllable. “But you should leave the village-handling to Nara.”

Uncle Naruto sticks his tongue out and for one second Sarada can spot Boruto plain and clear in the older man’s face. She shakes her head to get rid of the apparition, aware that despite her teammate’s protests, Boruto is so very alike his father.

Not one to be outdone, Naruto crosses his arms and slumps in his seat, glaring through the rising steam from his tea.

“Can’t believe you got it in you to dish your stupid opinions so early in the morning, you bastard. And after I deemed you important enough to visit!”

“Shouldn’t have bothered then.” Sasuke challenges with a smirk that sets Sarada on edge. She’s been present enough times to impromptu fistfights from these two because they don’t know when to stop with the insults. “I also don’t remember a time when I didn’t exert my opinions onto you early in the morning. Is your memory starting to wane away?”

The intensity of her uncle’s glare has Sarada inwardly groaning, though in reality she only leans her chin in her hand, half draped over the table and watching with interest.

“Sasuke-kun? Sarada? Do you have everything you need?”

Her mother’s voice breaks through the haze of the argument. Her uncle deflates visibly while Sarada’s father squares his shoulders and stands up. Sakura comes back down, but she is not dressed in her civilian clothes anymore, nor is she sporting Konoha’s standard uniform. Sarada’s eyebrows climb on her forehead because she has seen photos of previous versions, but she’s never seen her mother wear shinobi gear that is not the standard.

Sakura swapped her sleeveless top for a long quipao dress of the same color that Sarada remembers her mother buying a very long time ago, insisting that it is comfortable and stretchy, which made absolutely no sense to a nine year old kid. The dress is slit on both sides midthigh and Sarada can peek at the knee length black leggings beneath. And just because her mother insisted that the dress is airy and not too tight, Sakura secured it with an old black obi Sarada has seen her mother wear once in an old photo.

Sarada nods and rises as well, intent on being the first to equip herself and slip out of the door.

“You look great Sakura-chan!” Uncle Naruto exclaims with a sleazy grin that Sarada is ninety percent sure is there only to irritate her father. “The bastard should be careful not to lose you in the crowd of admirers.”

“Naruto!” Sakura growls, though she rolls her eyes in amusement and embarrassment.

Sasuke on the other hand, points a glare that could slice a mountain in half in the Hokage’s direction, a look that uncle Naruto takes as his cue to get going.

“Safe journey you guys! Don’t forget to write me!” He is an orange whirlwind of movement as he slides into his sandals and picks up the package he promised to deliver.

Sarada attempts to place back a few disturbed strands of hair as she watches the door slip closed. Her father’s loud exhale springs Sarada into action and she has just finished fastening her second shoe when her father arrives with an outstretched hand in her direction.

She gingerly accepts the bulging weapon pack, slightly judging the reason for so many weapons. Sarada is aware that danger might be lurking anywhere, but she’s never encountered anything beyond the stray bear on the road before and she hardly ever hears news of ambushes and thievery on the main roads.

Despite the possibility that her father might be just a tad paranoid, she supposes that on less travelled roads there might be enough danger to warrant such a big amount of weapons.

Sarada patiently waits for her parents to finish with their own preparations. She reclines by the door, watching her mother step through the two towers of cardboard boxes as her father dons his travelling cloak.

“Are those,” he begins and Sarada sees him wrestling with himself over the necessity of the question, “going to stay there until we get back?”

Sakura huffs as she extracts a pair of high, black heeled boots from the shoe closet.

“No, they won’t. Ino is coming to pick them up in a few days. They are for donations and for the kids at the clinic.”

Impending mission or not, her mother still managed to transform their departure into a deep clean of their closets.

“Hm.”

Sarada opens the door to their apartment and slips into the silent, dark world outside. The dim hallway looks a daunting task, but her father takes point and guides them through the empty streets. She has to commend her father – they make it in record time. Much faster than at any other hour of the day. Sarada unconsciously grips the straps of her pack tighter as the massive gates of the village come into view.

“Are you alright carrying it like that?”

Her mother’s voice interrupts whatever wave of emotions threatened to overwhelm her. Sarada turns her head to catch Sakura in the process of donning a pair of black elbow protectors. Her mother’s green eyes slide to the pack Sarada carries in one hand and she realizes what she was asking.

“You shouldn’t jump through trees like that.”

Sarada wants to roll her eyes, really. She is not fresh out of the Academy anymore, though she knows that in terms of experience she is just at the beginning. Still, her mother has made several points and Sarada wants nothing less than perfect harmony in the following months, so she silently slips her pack on her back, tightening the security strap until she is satisfied that she can move about freely.

They exit the village under the watchful eye of the shinobi on the morning shift without any incident and they make it about halfway down the road when her father stops and waits for them to catch up.

His mismatched eyes take them both in and Sarada struggles to interpret the foreign expression on his face, though one look at her mother confirms the suspicions she is harbouring. The mushy expression on her mother’s face would be basically painted over her father’s, had he not been such a stuck up at expressing whatever he was feeling. Either way, things got emotional a little too fast for her thirteen year old self to properly handle.

“Why are we stopping?”

The damper Sarada just put out on the mood is hardly helpful, but it prompts Sasuke to look down at her, the beginnings of a smile curving one corner of his mouth.

“We’re leaving the main road and heading south. Our first stop is in the Land of Rivers.”

Sarada nods in understanding. She catches her mother throw her a wink before they jump after her father in the dense canopy of the trees.

The next few hours are spent jumping from tree branch to tree branch and trying to keep up with the rapid pace papa is setting. Her mother doesn’t seem to mind, but Sarada has to double her efforts in order to really keep up with them. In true Uchiha fashion, she covers her valiant efforts with a tough façade, struggling to keep her place in between her parents.

Her father keeps point and her mother brings up the rear, which leaves Sarada with the only job of not letting the gap between them widen and be open to attack. The absurd little task is enough to deplete her small reserves of stamina and by the time noon rolls around Sarada is struggling to fling herself onward to the next branch. Luckily, her mother is well versed in people hiding behind careful crafted façades and she doesn’t hesitate to call to her husband to stop.

They land in a small area by the lip of a riverbank, populated with only thick bushes and tall grass that sways under the invisible caress of the wind.

Sarada drops to the ground like a rock to the bottom of the river, gracelessly and without preamble. Her knees are shaking and now that there’s no rapid air current cutting across her face, she realizes that her skin is flushed and sweaty.

“You shouldn’t push yourself so hard, Sarada!” Sakura scoots towards her, her hands dripping with water.

Sarada has time to frown in confusion before her mother’s hands lightly touch the sides of her face. The effect is instantaneous. The refreshing water feels amazing against her burning skin and Sarada closes her eyes and sighs with pleasure.

“We could have slowed down if you said so.”

Her father’s voice filters through the buzzing haze of her tired mind. Sarada’s eyes snap open, heart hammering inside her chest. She looks to the ground, aware of both her parents’ concerned gazes on her, but she cannot begin to explain that all she wants is to rise to their expectations. This mission is all about proving herself among other things. If she cannot even keep up with them when jumping through trees…

Her father wordlessly sits down next to her and her mother’s hands retreat. Sakura smiles at them.

“It’s a good thing we stopped anyway,” she takes out a rather large package covered in a light blue wrapping, “because it’s lunch time!”

While her mother busies herself with spreading out whatever food she packed to go, Sarada gathers her knees close to her chest and rests her chin on top. Her morose expression must be the most obvious thing in the whole forest because her father gently nudges her shoulder.

“We aren’t on a tight schedule so we can take it easier.” He says quietly, his words lost over her mother’s good-natured humming. “Even on a mission, you shouldn’t overexert yourself before the real action starts.”

Leave it to her father to make this into a life lesson, but Sarada doesn’t have the strength to formulate an answer. Thankfully, her mother takes that moment to present them with nothing short of a feast. Now it makes sense why her backpack was bulging and threatening to burst at the seams.

They make it back onto the main road just as the sun reaches the highest peaks of the distant mountains on the horizon. Sarada traces the glowing orange orb as they travel, watching it paint the sky in reds, pinks and blues that slowly fade into a black starry sky.

“Never forget to enjoy the beauty around you.” Her father says in a shocking display of waxed poetic revelry. His words seem to come from another plane of existence, but Sarada barely has the time to reflect on it because they break the border and enter the Land of Rivers.

The scenery changes gradually and their country’s forests recede into smaller, more compact plots of land, fenced on all sides by limbs of water. They curl across the landscape, converge and diverge into more branches that make Sarada dizzy just trying to keep track of them.

She trails after her parents as they run across grassy plains and jumps over moss covered rocks that break the glassy surface of the rivers blocking their way forward. Her mother announces the capital city just a few more miles away, her own way of encouraging Sarada forward.

As much as the youngest Uchiha preached an experimented figure on shinobi missions, this day just served to remind her that she is nowhere near her parents’ levels. She keeps getting more and more tired, but in complete contrast, her parents seem to sprout wings the further they run. Sarada watches their backs and struggles to understand how her mother seems freer than she’s ever seen her, and how her father is less a glum ball of inhibitions and more a bird finally stretching its wings into the sky.

Maybe that is why he’s always away. Maybe he feels more at ease here, though Sarada cannot start to imagine how. This is not home – _home_ is with her and her mother in _Konoha_.

“I can see it!” Her mother’s gasp interrupts Sarada’s crumbling thoughts.

The young girl looks up to the horizon dotted with twinkling stars and spots the first golden yellow swirls of light that announce a village.

They slow down before the large gate announcing entrance to the village. The city is surrounded by a large aqueduct that breaks off into hundreds of smaller branches that snake through the settlement. At a closer look, Sarada sees that most streets are actually rivers and people either use chakra to walk on water or boats to navigate the watery streets.

There are two main streets made of earth and they intersect each other in the center of the village. The intersection is large and crowded, but the shinobi representatives sent as a welcome party are able to spot them without problems. Sarada’s head swivels tirelessly to the left and to the right, taking in the bustling town and the colourful shops advertising their products in neon lights.

Their guides bring them all onto a long boat and they retreat from the crowds and onto narrower, silent streets that have her father deflate with relief at the sanctity of it all.

The inn the Tanigakure authorities reserved for them is built on wooden beams and rests above the water like a peaceful island. The inside is luxurious and filled with flowers, paintings and warm colours.

Sarada stays behind, hands behind her back as her father accepts their keys from the innkeeper. Her mother chirps a few jovial goodbyes to their hosts as they retreat into the night and then she turns her head and shoots Sasuke a sleazy grin that Sarada pretends she doesn’t catch.

“Sarada,”

Sarada rises from the flower arrangement she got her nose stuck in and twirls to her father with an innocent little smile that only seems to confuse the man, judging by his slightly raised brow. He extends his only hand, room key clutched between his fingers.

“Your room.”

Sarada’s lips split into a grin and gingerly accepts the key and darts up the stairs without waiting for her parents. The number on the blue plaque reads 201 so she takes a second set of stairs and bursts into the room at the end of the hall.

The space is smaller than she imagined, but it’s clean and it smells nice. Sarada leaves her bag and boots by the door and starts to inspect the place she will sleep in tonight.

There is a bed with white linen and an embroidered pillow filled with dainty flowers and a short nightstand made of light wood. Sarada crouches down and looks under the bed before she rights herself and thumps on it once. She rises with a smile and her eyes catch her reflection in a small, rectangular mirror that hangs over a low dresser. The soft carpet muffles her steps as she opens the door to a criminally small bathroom that takes a wince out of her, but the space is marginally enough for her to easily maneuver in. She can’t imagine her dad would be too comfortable in here though.

With a shake of her head, Sarada turns down the lights and closes the door. There is a sudden knock and her mother’s head appears through the small crack.

Sakura smiles at the sight of her daughter and fully steps inside. Her pack is back with Sasuke in their own room across Sarada’s, but she wanted to stop by and make sure that her daughter is comfortable and satisfied with her room.

“Is everything alright, honey?”

Sarada nods, barely suppressed excitement bubbling under the surface of her tired smile.

“Yeah, the room is great!”

The young girl throws herself on the bed and Sakura giggles behind her hand.

“I’m glad to hear that! We have to be at the hospital at nine tomorrow morning. One of us will come get you when it’s time to go, alright?”

Sarada nods from the bed and Sakura winks at her and bids her goodnight.

The door closes with a click and Sarada exhales long and slow, eyes on the ceiling. She might as well sleep, even if it would be a waste of this awesome room. But she’s too tired to read anything and the muscles in her legs are aching.

With a small groan, she jumps to her feet and stalks to the glass doors that lead to a minuscule balcony overlooking the canal below. The air is balmy and the night sky is an uncharted canopy of lights. It’s too attractive not to take a minute and admire it. Sarada’s heart leaps inside her chest with excitement at the thought that she will see many more of these kinds of skies until it’s time to return home.

* * *

Tanigakure’s hospital is a low squatting building, light blue like the sparkling water of the canals surrounding it. It’s hardly half the size of Konoha’s hospital, but judging from her mother’s delighted exclamations, it is well equipped and up to her standards.

This morning, Sarada woke up with a giddy sense of adventure taking place in her heart and her morning routine passed by quicker than on any other day. By the time her father had finally come knocking at her door, Sarada was already bracing herself for a short, unsanctioned look around the block.

They got breakfast in a large common room next to the inn’s reception. It was a hurried affair, but Sarada tasted the most exquisite type of pastries she’s ever had, so she couldn’t find it in herself to be displeased when three jonin from Tanigakure showed up for them.

The walk through the village was spent with Sarada openly gawking at their foreign surroundings. There are many more things to this place than she’d first thought and suddenly, she’s desperate to see them all.

A warm hand presses down on her left shoulder. Sarada’s head jerks to the side, surprised by its appearance but her father never breaks stride as they walk behind her mother.

Sakura is busy talking shop with the medic nin sent to guide her towards the hospital, but Sasuke caught the faltering in his daughter’s step. The possibility of getting lost in this place is high and the last thing the man wants is to enrol on an urgent search for Sarada. Despite the flexible guidelines of their mission, he still puts duty before any sport.

“Thank you, Uchiha-sensei! We will make sure to send someone for you when the time comes.”

Sakura waves slightly, a dismissal and an acquiescence all in one, and turns to face her daughter and her husband. She bites back a grin as she catches them both standing ramrod straight beside one another, heads slightly tilted towards the ground and so obviously lost in their own thoughts. Sarada is so much her father’s daughter, it’s almost funny that they both insist the young girl takes more after her mother.

“Sasuke-kun, Sarada-chan,” Sakura starts, a lilt to her voice as she tries to rouse them back to reality without being too abrupt about it.

They both look up, identical questions written over their faces. This time a short chuckle escapes without her consent.

“I am all set up here, so you two can go out into town for the rest of the day. We can meet back at the inn tonight.”

Sasuke’s brow furrows at her words and Sakura sees the question coming from lightyears away.

“Are you sure we shouldn’t stay?”

Long used to such overprotective questions, but still burning with a fierce displeasure at being underestimated, Sakura narrows her eyes on her husband, though her tone is calm and soothing.

“I’m pretty sure I can handle myself, dear.”

Sasuke nods curtly, similarly used to recognizing when to back down. Sarada’s gaze pendulates between them, unsure if there is anything she can bring to the conversation.

She waves to her mother and watches her retreat further inside the building. Then Sarada turns to her father, full of expectations.

“We can go look around the village?”

Sasuke’s mouth quirks into a rare smile and he nods, throwing one last lingering look down the deserted hallway before following his daughter out onto the sunlit street.

“Can we go back to the main street? I saw a shop yesterday that I want to visit. And later we can take a boat down a few canals – I always wanted to ride a boat and the huge ship that brought us to Kirigakure doesn’t count!”

Sarada speaks a mile an hour and she is aware that she’s not usually so verbatim, especially around the comfortable bubble of silence that always surrounds her father. But her good mood spurns her on and the words tumble out of her mouth by themselves. If her father minds, he never says it out loud, but he does answer her questions or hums to encourage her to continue with her observations and she ends up detailing a small plan for the rest of their day.

Sarada barely has time to wonder how her mother is doing while she browses under her father’s watchful gaze through shop after shop for souvenirs and other knickknacks to bring to her friends back home. A small corner of her heart is filled with slight guilt at the fact that she gets to have such a fun day while her mother is out there working, but it is quickly stuffed over with delicious food from a corny restaurant that overlooks one of the smaller canals. She doesn’t even know how her father knew of this place, but the glass floor on the terrace captivated her from the first moment.

By the time Sarada declares that she is fully satisfied with the boat ride one of the locals offered them, it is close to sunset and her father’s eyes are closed against the starkly painted sky. He heaves a long-suffering sigh as they disembark, but he never regards her with anything but patience as they trek back to the inn.

He’s happy – Sarada can sense that as clear as day, but he is also a tight little ball of wariness and she wonders if despite the freedom her father seems to find when out of Konoha, there is also an underlying tension to his demeanour while traversing strangers’ land.

They dredge up the short set of steps to the inn’s front door and up one floor in silence.

Only to find that her mother is not back.

Sarada frowns from the threshold of her parents’ room. She had quickly deposited her newest acquisitions and decided that she wanted to hear about her mother’s day at the hospital. But her father let her in to a deserted room and now he is sitting on the bed with a thoughtful expression on his face while Sarada stands awkwardly in the doorway, waiting for him to make up his mind on whatever is bothering him.

“I’m sure your mother is just caught up with an intervention and she lost track of time.” He comments, slightly offhandedly, though Sarada senses the undercurrent of unease. Her mother would have at least sent a note to reassure them.

Sarada purses her lips and speaks her mind.

“But I’m sure she’ll be happy to see we came to pick her up. It’s much better than staying around doing nothing!”

Her father frowns and Sarada holds her breath, wondering what the final decision will be. With a short nod, Sasuke stands up and dons his cloak back on as they head out of the door and under the twilight sky outside.

Their walk is spent in listless silence, but once there they find the hospital abuzz with activity. Nurses fly left and right, almost trampling over their poor patients. Sarada is sharply pulled back when one brown haired woman jogs, arms full of scrolls and definitely not looking where she is going.

Sarada looks up to find her father with a heavy frown over the visible part of his face. Despite the good progress he’s doing, Sarada knows that if she wants to pry, she will have to open her mouth and ask.

“What’s wrong, papa?”

Sasuke’s gaze slides her way for a decisive second and his grip on her right shoulder tightens. It’s all Sarada needs to know that he’s worried about her mother.

“Just a bad feeling.” He murmurs and pulls her along towards the small reception desk.

There, a harried nurse is stationed and her eyes widen at her father’s blunt question about Sakura’s whereabouts.

“Ah, Uchiha-sensei is on the second floor laboratory right now.”

“May we go see her?” Sasuke asks, knowing from experience that hospitals are tricky things.

“I’d suggest not to. There is no danger of infection on that floor, but it’s better safe than sorry.”

With that said, they are forced to wait in two uncomfortable plastic chairs in the waiting room while the nurse goes to announce her mother of their arrival.

Half an hour later, Sakura walks in the hall, a sheepish smile on her face.

“Sorry! I got caught up.”

Sarada burns with the need to know, but her father waits until they are two streets away from the hospital before he asks quietly.

“Any problems?”

Her mother hums a little under her breath. A tired smile stretches over her lips.

“Something like that. There are a few strange cases of food poisoning with slightly abnormal symptoms, but I managed to make a breakthrough so they should be fine.”

“We can leave tomorrow as planned then?”

Sarada crosses her arms behind her back, listening attentively for the answer. It’s not like this place is bad, but she is impatient to get to Sunagakure. After hearing that she’ll be passing through, Shikadai had deemed it a good idea to regard her with a few stories about the place and a little about his uncles. Sarada is very curious to see if the Kazekage is anything like how he is portrayed in any of his nephew’s stories.

Sakura frees her hair from the ponytail she wore with a satisfied sigh.

“Yes, I think it’s safe to say so. If no one takes a turn for the worse until morning, then we can leave.”

Sasuke nods and Sarada fights back a smile at the utter longing look her parents share then, right there in the street. She doubts that they are very aware of anything beyond themselves, but just to be nice Sarada pretends to study her surroundings. It’s a well thought out plan since her grin widens without much prompting.

She’s always lamented that her parents rarely show affection under the scrutinous gazes of other people like she’s seen her friends’ parents do. But once she’s been confronted with them gazing in each other’s eyes in such a lovely-dovely manner, Sarada knew that she shouldn’t have worried. They just go and express it in other ways. She got this message clear and loud back with the whole Shin fiasco.

“I hope you got me some takeout because I am starving.”

Her mother’s expectant comment makes both father and daughter freeze and wince in the balmy night breeze.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> '-sensei' is used in japanese for teachers as well as doctors, which is the reason for the hospital staff calling Sakura such
> 
> This story will incorporate some japanese prefixes that I feel work better than their english equivalents


	2. Day 2

* * *

**_Sarada's tip:_ ** _Don't accept child discounts in exchange for ridiculous favors._

_But if you do - make sure papa isn't looking._

* * *

“Are you sure you didn’t put it in papa’s pack?”

Sarada rearranges the backpack on her back, watching her mother through her slightly smudged glass lenses. Sakura is crouched to the ground, half a mile out of Tanigakure, with a hand in the backpack filled with her personal belongings and rummaging around.

She turns around and sees her father looking out to the horizon. The sun is gradually climbing in the sky and her mother most probably left something behind at the inn in Tanigakure.

Sarada sighs and settles on the slightly damp grass, wondering what her mother is so ardently searching for.

“No, I don’t think so – _Aha_!” Sakura victoriously presents her headband to the sun and her family. The scratched metal glints in the shy rays of the morning sun and the dark pink material flutters in the breeze.

“That’s what you were searching for…” Sarada rests her cheek on her closed fist, a pout over her mouth. “Why were you searching so desperately for it, mama?”

Sakura grins as she redoes the straps of her backpack and shoulders it over the larger one where her medical scrolls and stuff are deposited. She then ties the headband on her head with a flourish.

“Because it is important to keep up appearances, especially because we are going there in an official capacity.” Her mother says, hands resting on her hips and Sarada internalizes her sigh because the last thing she needs is her mother going off on a tangent for another lecture. “I forgot where I put it last night and I was afraid I left it at the hospital.”

Sarada pats her own headband then sits up. Her mother walks up to her father and her whole demeanour shifts from slightly disgruntled to shyly apologetic.

“Sorry for the wait, dear!”

Sasuke hums, a reassuring sound that finds her mother’s smile widening in turn.

Sarada rolls her eyes, but treks through the marsh after her parents. They go along the lip of a wide river, taking great care not to fall off the slightly abrupt edge. Sarada sometimes throws rocks in the crystal water to pass the time. It’s ineffective and tiresome to be running on such uneven ground, and since their mission does not demand them to hurry up, their little family walks on at a leisurely pace.

Her mother fills the silence and Sarada participates most of the time. Even her father forwards an answer or two when something piques his interest. She continues to marvel at her mother’s prompt attitude and the seemingly endless list of subjects she can tackle with expert dexterity.

Her mother is used to fill the silence her father cultivates around him like a vacuum, but it’s not because she is uncomfortable or does not enjoy the tranquil peace around her husband. Sakura likes to talk, she likes to say her thoughts out loud and propose them to the word while her father decidedly does not. Her mother speaks happily and Sarada is pretty sure that her father enjoys listening to her, no matter what she ends up saying.

It’s fascinating to watch this polar opposition from close by, but Sarada is her mother’s daughter and she likes to talk as much as she enjoys keeping her silence when she isn’t in the mood. But her mother’s chatter is infectious, and she is soon sucked into the conversation.

The scenery likewise passes by while they trudge on and by lunchtime, they are almost at the border with the Land of Wind. Sunagakure is still a good way away, but Sarada knows that from here on out they will be running full speed ahead.

The desert at noon is a hell trap, but the desert in the rainy season at noon is, simply put, awful. The heat is considerably more endurable, but winds blow from what feels like every direction and they make it hard to keep walking in a straight line.

Mama equipped Sarada with a thick headscarf that covers her mouth and nose, a long cloak that almost touches the ground and a pair of goggles on top of her usual glasses. They press into her face painfully, but it’s better than walking around blind or having her glasses stolen by the strong wind.

Her father guides them with sure strides and her mother once more brings up the rear. Sarada receives detailed instructions on what to do in case she finds a scorpion in her way, or how to counter the slippery grains of sand with chakra in her feet.

Her chest is heaving with deep breaths by the time they pull up next to a lone cactus growing under the scorching heat. Her father takes a swing of water, then spits it on the ground.

Sarada and her mother startle at the action. Papa stays frozen, eyes wide and fixed on the rapidly drying spot in the sand. He looks just as surprised at his action as they are. The water in the canteen swishes as he shakes it and frowns.

“What is it, darling?”

Sasuke sniffs at the mouth of the canteen and his nose scrunches up. Sarada sits up in alarm.

“This water is not right.”

Her mother takes a hearty swing and moves the water around her mouth for a moment before she likewise spits it out. She glares at the offending liquid.

“It isn’t. What in the world…?”

Sarada looks to her own bottle with a good dose of uncertainty. She does not want to experience the same thing again.

“Did you fill it this morning?”

Sarada’s father glares into the offending canteen. “No, I did that yesterday.”

But Sarada filled it today. With a tight heart, she takes a short sip of water and keeps it in her mouth, trying to feel if anything is amiss, but nothing registers. Slowly, she swallows.

Clearing her throat, she offers her bottle to her parents. “I filled mine this morning. It doesn’t seem bad.”

Sakura’s narrowed eyes do not budge. She turns her head from one bottle to the other, makes a short list inside her mind and then snatches both objects from them.

“Don’t drink it anymore. I don’t know what the problem is, but I’ve hardly seen water go bad in such short time. I’m going to have to take a look at it in Suna.”

Her father nods decisively, but Sarada wants to whine because she is tired and now she has to be thirsty, too.

Thankfully, Sunagakure rises on the horizon before anything rises out of the ground and tries to eat them in the middle of the night. Her mother takes the lead then, and Sarada winds her arm through hers, trying to appear nonchalant when she is actually struggling to keep moving and not fall down face first in the sand. She never expected the journey to be so taxing and Sarada isn’t exactly sure if it’s because she is untrained, or that her parents have incredibly high expectations of the distance they can cover.

A tall man with a painted face and an attire consisting of a black getup and headgear walks up to them, surrounded by Suna shinobi. He looks like an important person and after a second of parsing through her memories, Sarada realizes that this is the oldest of Shikadai’s uncles.

Kankuro greets her mother and Sarada with a wide smile and her father with a serious nod.

Sarada watches the masses of Suna shinobi cheerily – and sometimes loudly – welcome them as they pass by and another second of thoughtful silence offers Sarada the insight she needs. Her mother always speaks of her relationship with the people in Suna with giddy happiness and not once has Sarada heard the tale of how her mother saved the life of the Kazekage’s older brother. And then collaborated with an esteemed Suna shinobi in taking down the most dangerous criminal in Suna.

Though seeing it is another thing altogether, now everything makes sense.

The outer wall of the village is a statuesque thing and it’s thicker than the one surrounding Konohagakure. Sarada watches with an open mouth as they pass through the narrow corridor. A powerful gust of wind lifts the sand on the ground in a miniature vortex and as soon as Sarada’s eyesight clears she gasps with wonder.

Sunagakure is a wide, illuminated city under the night sky full of stars. The buildings are built to get lost in the landscape, yet they retain something mystical about them, like finding an oasis in the middle of a desert.

Her mother converses with Kankuro and another Suna shinobi all the way to the Kazekage’s office – a towering residence, bigger and more prominent than the others, settled at the heart of the village. Sarada feels her father’s constant presence behind her, like an almighty shield that blocks more than just the unpredictable weather. She finds herself leaning into that cozy safety, but her gaze never ceases to wander around as they walk past.

The shops are as colourfully advertised as they are in Konoha, but the streets are dusty. Yet the faces she sees are all warm like the dessert beyond the walls and they look on with curiosity and sometimes awe when they figure out who the late-night visitors are.

“What do you think of Sunagakure, Sarada?”

The girl in question startles at being addressed so abruptly and blinks at the tall man with a purple lined grin. Kankuro wiggles his eyebrows as he continues. “It’s _way_ better than Konoha, right?”

The way he childishly drags the second word has Sarada’s mouth puckering into a shy smile.

She studiously looks around once more, never breaking stride, but also not wanting to look like she answers thoughtlessly.

“It’s certainly amazing. Even if I’ve never been here before, this place feels really welcoming.” A thought occurs to her then. “That’s right, Shikadai mentioned something like this once…”

Against all odds, Kankuro laughs, and the way he laughs is infectious. Head thrown back and amused with his whole person, Sarada can kind of see a little bit of uncle Naruto in there.

“That lazy nephew of mine better not be slacking off!”

The puppet master stops suddenly and winks in her direction and he rubs his chin. “I suppose this is a point in Suna’s favour.”

Her mother is walking in front of her, but Sarada feels the way she rolls her eyes.

“I cannot believe that you guys are still doing this!”

“Well Gaara certainly isn’t, but somebody’s got to!” Kankuro defends. “Not to mention that the guys in marketing – of all things! – keep napping at me like I’m supposed to do something about it!”

Sarada cannot, for the life of her, see any common traits between aunt Temari and her brother. She’s heard that he can be pretty tense, but it seems that tonight he is in a good mood. He turns to her again and his gaze dances playfully, Sarada can see it even in the low light.

“It’d be a great service if we could get someone from the Uchiha clan to publicly endorse us, you know?”

For the first time in a long while, Sarada hears her father’s voice. His timbre is low and gravelly, but he seems relaxed. She usually sees this side of him – slightly threatening, more than impatient – when he talks with uncle Naruto.

Like he’s fighting very hard not to call their host an idiot.

“You will not put my daughter up in one of those corny advertisements.”

A vein twitches in Sarada’s forehead and she looks up to the night sky imploringly.

_That’s what public endorsement means then…_

Kankuro affects an air of disappointment but thankfully does not insist.

Public office hours are long passed, but they are nonetheless welcomed by the fifth Kazekage.

The red haired man smiles thinly, but there is no mistaking the joy behind his strange eyes.

“Welcome. I hope that your journey wasn’t excessively awful.”

Sakura waves a hand in dismissal with a short laugh, but Sarada is shocked to see her father incline his head left and right, as if weighting the journey and trying to make a decision. It is as much of a humorous sight as it is certainly premeditated to a joke because Gaara’s smile widens and Kankuro snickers behind his hand.

“Even if your timing isn’t impeccable regarding the weather, I hope you will find your stay here enjoyable.” The Kazekage certainly has a way with words. Sarada’s muscles freeze when his gaze falls on her. His smile, if possible, widens more. “And this is your daughter, yes?”

Sarada affects a formal position and inclines her head. “Uchiha Sarada. It is nice to meet you.”

Shockingly, the Kazekage inclines his head in return, as if he isn’t in the top position in his village. “Likewise. I hope you will like it here. Despite his demeanour, Shikadai usually likes to visit. I heard you were classmates.”

Sarada nods in confirmation, curious to see where the man is going with this. Gaara nods in return.

“He did speak of you when Temari pestered him to tell us about his class in the Academy.”

“That kid is a handful, but our sister is worse!”

Gaara shoots his brother a reprimanding look and mama looks slightly uneasy. Sarada can guess why – aunt Temari is a good friend and even if people ( _uncle Naruto_ and _Shikamaru-san_ ) claim that their friendship came out of the left field, they get along very well.

_Temari-san is kind of forceful though…_

Sarada can see the common ground her mother and Temari-san share though. They are both incredibly scary when they want to.

“In any case, it’s an honour.” Gaara’s voice reminds Sarada that they are still in the Kazekage’s office. “Please don’t hesitate to ask for anything.”

“Thank you for everything.” Her father’s gaze barely wavers as it meets Gaara’s. Sarada watches the silence stretch, but Kankuro seems to take his role as second in command seriously enough to take it upon himself to break the ice.

“If Shikadai didn’t snitch on the best places around, we’ll share the secret.”

Shikadai _did_ snitch, but just because he declared that Sarada would do well not to hang around his uncles too much because they are strange people.

Nonetheless she nods with a smile. Kankuro _is_ a tad strange, she thinks, but Gaara seems pretty nice. She doesn’t understand what Shikadai’s problem is, but they are his family so he must be privy to things that Sarada isn’t.

“I trust you know where the hospital is located.” Gaara addresses her mother. She nods with a challenging grin. “I will be waiting for you there tomorrow morning then.”

“Understood.”

“Then I shall leave you to rest for now. Have a good night.”

The Kazekage is nothing like Sarada imagined, though she knew that he has a way with words. He seems overly formal yet casual at the same time, which is slightly distressing, and also something Sarada doesn’t think she can ever achieve.

The hotel Suna’s leader put them up in doesn’t lack for anything. Sarada’s never seen such luxurious accommodations before. She hears her mother sigh with desperation from the closed doorway.

“Gaara’s overdone it again.”

If by _again_ this means that it’s a usual thing, then Sarada makes a mental note to join her parents whenever they pass by. There’s no way she won’t take every possible opportunity to enjoy such an amazing and lavish suite.

Which is another new thing – the Suna authorities put them in an apartment. Her parents have the bigger bedroom on the left side facing the village, while Sarada’s room connects with the entrance hallway on the right side and overlooks a dune garden – tastefully and artistically constructed.

“This is really amazing!”

Her father grunts in something between agreement and a snort but he makes his way inside without preamble or the modesty her mother preaches.

Sarada grins and jogs to jump on her soft bed. Her eyes find the tall windows leading outside and she thinks that sleep will be scarce tonight with all the excitement still swimming through her veins.

* * *

DAY 3

Not surprisingly, she sleeps despite her grand plans of studying the garden outside her window. The sun peeks over Sunagakure’s tall wall from out east when her mother gently shakes her awake and informs her that they will be leaving in half an hour.

Sarada groggily enjoys her breakfast on the way to the hospital. She glances up at her father while she munches on the salty pastry in her hand. He is as unruffled as ever and there is not a trace of lack of sleep or anything resembling the soreness Sarada feels after their journey here.

Sasuke walks behind her with her mother, the latter which is carrying her bulging backpack filled with medical equipment. He listens to her talk about another one of her visits in Suna and Sarada’s interest is piqued. Despite the millions of stories Sakura has told her daughter, none of them have included any kind of revelation as to the reason her mother is all but _revered_ in this village.

But she has no time to open her mouth and ask because at the end of the street is the brown building of the hospital. The sand on the ground between them and their destination suddenly gathers as if attracted by a strong magnet and rises into a tall dune that turns into Lord Kazekage.

Sarada blinks a few times as her mind struggles to understand that the Kazekage is suddenly standing in her way, a small smile over his lips. Likewise adopting his method, another pile of black sand heaves up and spits out a kid Sarada last saw at the Chunin exams before all hell broke loose.

Shinki’s expression remains blank as his gaze passes over Sarada and her parents. He inclines his head politely in silent greeting.

“Good morning.” The Kazekage says as if he didn’t just pop out of the ground.

“Good morning!”

Her mother steps forward, a warm smile on her face, but Sarada sees her sharp gaze pass critically over the thirteen year old boy next to the leader.

“Is this your son, Gaara?”

The man inclines his head in a nod. Sarada glances up to her father, but he is as unhelpful as always. Sasuke barely looks anywhere but at his wife and then at the Kazekage. The young girl rolls her eyes and looks back, only to find Shinki already watching them.

Her eyebrows twitch, a silent question and an accusation all in one and the boy’s eyes narrow once he understands her unspoken message.

Sarada isn’t one to make good friends with former enemies, but she can at least offer this kid the benefit of the doubt until he proves her wrong. Besides, they are guests in his country.

“It’s very nice to meet you!” Her mother is suddenly in the kid’s face and the poor boy takes a step back in shock.

He mumbles a hurried sentence in return, eyes on the ground. Sarada tries her best not to snicker.

Sasuke clears his throat softly, a signal that they should get going. Her mother and Gaara readily agree.

This is how Sarada finds herself in the lobby, seated in a chair a little too big for her and swinging her legs impatiently. Her mother is already long gone to deposit her things and equip herself, but her father and Lord Kazekage stay behind, a few paces away from her seat.

“Why are you in Suna?”

Shinki’s question shakes Sarada out of her frustrated stupor. The girl blinks and turns to the boy sitting next to her.

“I’m on a mission with my parents.”

The boy’s painted eyebrows climb upon his forehead, as if the very notion is utterly foreign. And maybe, for him, it is. It was for Sarada too, until a short while ago. Feeling more merciful than usual, she decides to include an abridged explanation of the job.

“Me and papa are here as mama’s guards.”

“And the Hokage… agreed to this?”

“He did.”

“But you did not come here with the Thunder Train.” Shinki’s statement curves into a question by the end. The boy seems incredulous to hear that they came here on foot.

Sarada didn’t understand why her parents decided not to use the convenient form of transportation either. Both her father and her mother steadfastly refused to take the train, citing that they prefer to take the road on foot. Sarada swears that she saw a tear glistening at the corner of uncle Naruto’s blue eyes and the curve of his smile seemed more wistful than amused in the face of their refusal. She still struggles to understand, but she hopes that by the end of this extended mission she will.

“No, my parents decided to travel on foot since we have to make a lot of stops.”

Shinki hesitantly nods and thankfully lets it rest.

Her mother picks that moment to return to the reception room, a white coat over her clothes and a clipboard in her hand. Sakura uses the other to flip through the clipped files with narrowed eyes that give Sarada a certain dose of anxiety. Whenever her mother looks like that at something, that something is not right.

She walks up to their little group and fixes a concerned gaze on the Kazekage.

“They just told me about the sudden surge in food poisonings.”

Gaara turns to face her mother, hands crossed over his chest. 

“Yes, which is why it’s good that you came at this time. These recent cases are all a little too sudden and numerous for my taste.”

One of mama’s eyebrows twitches, as if she can’t decide on the right answer to this. The line between her brows deepens the more she flips through whatever documents she holds on her clipboard.

“And your doctors arrived at the same conclusion? That it is food poisoning?”

Gaara nods, though Sarada doubts that her mother wanted more than just the final stamp regarding this case from the highest authority in the state.

Mama’s green eyes shift left and right, though Sarada doubts that her mother is looking at something in particular. Her current facial expression says that her thoughts run deeper than just a possible reason for this crazy coincidence.

“I’ve just treated a couple of cases of food poisoning in Tanigakure.”

Her murmur is lost in the general hubbub of the reception room. Everyone is silent, either too respectful to interrupt her mother’s train of thought or afraid of what this might mean. Sarada finds herself certainly in the latter category.

The young girl shifts restlessly in her seat, hands pressed in between her thighs and her gaze flitting from one person to the other.

“Whatever the case, this might mean that it’s not what it seems to be.”

As if summoned by her words, a Suna shinobi bursts into the hospital. He looks with wide eyes around the room but his fervent movements stutter when his eyes find Sakura and the Kazekage.

“Kazekage-sama!” The man bows hurriedly and turns from his leader to the Leaf medic. “We just received a message for Uchiha Sakura-san.” He offers a thin, deep purple scroll. “It arrived from Tanigakure.”

Sarada’s heart sinks in her chest, a bad train of thoughts swarming her mind in the next second. Her mother receives the message with careful stillness, and her face betrays nothing. Sarada almost jumps from her seat at the sound of the scroll’s paper crumpling.

“Most cases in Tanigakure died this morning.”

The Kazekage’s sharp intake of breath breaks whatever stillness there ever was.

Her mother’s green eyes are almost stormy, and her glare reminds Sarada of the aftermath of bad shifts at the hospital.

“This isn’t just a simple case of food poisoning. It certainly goes way deeper than that. I’m sure now.” Sakura turns to her father then and he surprises Sarada when he extracts two bottles out of the pack resting on the seat on her other side and extends them to her.

Sakura shakes the bottles pointedly.

“I think these might prove a good clue to this sudden outbreak. They are filled with water from Tanigakure. My husband tried to drink from one, but it turned undrinkable. The other was still good.”

“What’s the difference then?” The Kazekage’s bright eyes are filled with worry.

Her mother shakes her head. “That is what I will find out. Until I finish what first-hand tests I can do, I will have your doctors do a screening and a full background check of the last few weeks for each of the patients.”

“Can it be water poisoning?” Sasuke’s deep voice cuts through the spiking throes of worry exuding from the Kazekage and his guard. Even Shinki seems shaken by the turn of events.

Sakura bites her lip. “Until I have the test results, I can’t say anything for sure. But it is a high possibility.”

“That would mean the whole water system.” Gaara’s horrified whisper would have seemed uncharacteristic, had the situation been any less desperate. He turns to her father then, as if willing Sasuke to come up with a jutsu to purify the water system.

Unfortunately, Sarada’s father only offers a tight lipped frown, as helpless as any of them. His gaze slides to her mother then and they seem to hold an entire conversation with just a look.

Sakura offers a slight nod – the only clue that there was even a talk in the first place. She turns back to Gaara, her smile strangled.

“I don’t want to induce mass panic but…” Her mother trails off, unsure how to break the best course of action to the Kazekage without making his life a thousand times harder.

“But it might be better to limit access to the water supply?” The resigned tone of the Kage tells Sarada all that she needs to know. Their luxurious stay in Suna might not be that comfortable after all.

Gaara closes his eyes against the harsh reality but opens them a moment later. They shine with determination and he nods.

“I will do what I can.”

Her mother’s lips curve into a small smile of gratitude.

“I will send a report as soon as I have the results.” Sakura turns to her then and Sarada awaits her next words with trepidation, but nothing comes forth. Instead she turns to her father and her smile quivers. “Watch after Sarada, please.”

Sasuke nods, as serious as when accepting any other high level mission. Sarada presses her lips together and decides to restrain her slew of protests for once. The situation is warranted enough tension as it is. There is no use telling her mother something that would worry her even more and serve to distract her from her job.

Once her mother’s retreating back turned the corner, the Kazekage turns to her father, an inscrutable expression clouding his features.

“We need to talk.” His head inches to the side and he adds. “In my office.”

Sarada is already on her feet before her father had time to properly turn in her direction. The visible corner of his mouth twitches and Sarada grins, though it falls as soon as he turns around and follows their host.

Shinki falls into step next to her, and he is understandably silent. Thoughts of the earlier conversation turn Sarada’s mind into a minefield of worries and theories.

She is slightly angry that what was supposed to be a nice time to relax with her parents turned into something so awful, but at the same time the shinobi in her is intrigued and more so ready to give it her all, should the need for her skills arise. She knows that her parents will take it upon themselves to solve this until they cannot protect her anymore and after a few other frustrating situations, Sarada realized that this is one thing that she cannot avoid.

But when they won’t be able to stretch in so many directions anymore, Sarada won’t just stand back and do nothing. Her parents might be stubborn in their overprotectiveness, but they are also aware that she is almost a chunin in both skill and mindset. There is nothing they can do to stop her.

_Unless papa decides to be funny and sends me to another dimension._

The way she doesn’t even question the possibility of that happening makes her release a tired breath into the hot air. The arid air in Suna comes at the worst possible time, now that the imminent reduction of the water reserves dangles over their heads. Even now her throat aches dry at the thought and Sarada grits her teeth.

The Kazekage’s office filled with light that comes from the row of round windows on the opposite wall. Sarada picks out little details she didn’t the first time around – like the small succulents that seem to clutter every open surface and the rugs over the hard floor. There is a stack of neatly arranged documents on the large desk, but nothing as exaggerated as Lord Seventh’s office back home.

Gaara slides in the chair behind the desk and Kankuro retreats to rest against the wall. The man had materialized at their side the moment they stepped inside the Kazekage’s tower and by the expression over his painted face, it seemed that he is aware of what is going on. Shinki settles on Gaara’s other side, blank gaze pointed at the floor.

Sarada slinks against the opposite wall, near the door while her father steps up to the desk.

A minute of silence passes before Gaara speaks, a tired timbre to his voice.

“This is top secret information, but I trust that you will not divulge it.” The Kazekage opens a drawer and extracts two folders from it. The documents are set on the table with a dull thud that confirms the severe quantity of papers stuck inside.

“Suna has been investigating a terrorist group rumoured to engineer very strong poisons and sell them on the black market at low prices. But the problem proved to be an international one, which is why we managed to secure a collaboration with both Iwagakure and Ishigakure, and later the samurai. Our forces followed the trail up north, until the Land of Iron, but it disappeared abruptly there.”

The Kazekage makes a pause then, seemingly lost in thought. He shakes his head before long and continues.

“Since then our efforts proved more counterproductive than anything else.”

Her father finally opens his mouth, but he doesn’t ask what Sarada expects.

“How are you so certain that these are the same culprits?”

The red haired man behind the desk seems taken aback by the question and Sarada cannot begrudge him the confusion. She is as blindsided by her father’s words as the Kazekage is.

Sensing the sudden turn of the room, Sasuke fills the silence left in the wake of his question.

“You said it yourself – these terrorists, or whoever they are,” Sarada spots the slight tightening of her father’s shoulders, even under that cloak, “are selling poisons on the black market. How are you so certain that they are the ones poisoning the water supply?”

Gaara laces his fingers together over the surface cluttered with papers and glares at the digits, as if personally offended. The man clearly hesitates, as if whatever information he needs to divulge is not savvy enough to be said out loud. Or maybe he has other reasons that Sarada does not understand.

“For me to say that is to bring you and your family into the fold.”

The Kazekage’s eyes flash with a certain something, but it is too fast for Sarada to make sense of it. His gaze never wavers from her father’s lone eye and Sarada suddenly curses herself for choosing such a strategically bad place. She finds herself intensely curious to see her father’s expression right now.

“Are you sure you want me to do that?”

Her father barely needs a moment before he answers, voice calm and efficient.

“I think we’re already deep enough into this crap as it is.”

And surprises keep coursing. Sarada bites her lip, trying very hard to exhibit a level of professionalism pertaining to her status and _not_ laugh at the first bad word she’s ever heard her father utter _ever._

“So you might as well give me all the necessary information.”

Unruffled, Gaara only nods and shuffles a couple of papers into place.

“Iwagakure’s ANBU have been gathering information on them for more than six years to date. They have also monitored their movements but ceased doing so when one year ago any trace of the organization disappeared from their radar. But they re-emerged here in the Land of Wind.”

“So they caught on that they were being watched.” Her father concludes, rather derisively, and it makes Sarada’s brow crinkle into a disgruntled frown.

Surprisingly, Gaara shakes his head. “They probably decided to put their plan into action. There is much doubt that who we were keeping tabs on is only a faction of that organization to begin with. Our main goal was to find their headquarters and the bulk of their forces, but it is extremely difficult to navigate such a large area and comb every possible place they can hide in.”

Her father exhales through his nose, loud as if his mind is whirling with the possibilities and he just got to the worst one.

“You’d need ridiculous manpower to accomplish that.”

“Something that we cannot spare,” the Kazekage agrees, “even with the current peace of this age. There are always more urgent needs to be met. It proved practically impossible so the Tsuchikage, the leader of the Land of Stone and I arrived at an accord to put on standby all operations on this front.

Since they went radio silent in the Land of Earth, I only assigned a small team of ANBU to keep an eye on their movements here. There was nothing too suspicious, but their reports suggested days when the targets managed to escape from under their watchful eyes. It is possible that whatever they wanted to accomplish here, they managed to do it in those instances.”

Sarada thinks that it sounds pretty bad. She also thinks that whoever these people are, they are incredibly dangerous. If the ANBU couldn’t get a hold of them, then they must be exceptionally skilled in evading. Not only that, but if there are _more_ somewhere, in some other place, and they have a plan to attack the five allied countries, then this is going from bad to worse.

“We need to avoid any kind of conflict. Whatever it takes.”

Her father’s words are punctuated by a nod from Kankuro-san. The Kazekage’s face is set into stone, but his eyes tell Sarada that he is very much in agreement with what her father said.

“But they are also inciting us towards one. We cannot simply ignore the emerging problem, especially since it is an attack on our citizens. I am sure that Tanigakure is of the same opinion.”

Sarada shifts in place, uncomfortable with the reminder. She wonders how her mother must feel, knowing that the patients she had hope to recuperate actually died because her diagnosis was inaccurate. Despite the extremely tough exterior, her mother has a mellow heart that bleeds whenever bad things happen to innocent people.

“I will look into it then.”

Her father pauses, as if reminding himself that his wife and daughter are travelling with him this time.

“We will look into it.” He corrects, because there is slim doubt that her mother would take no for an answer in this lifetime and everyone, _especially_ her father, is better off not arguing with her. Most of all now, when the death of those Tanigakure citizens are still fresh and a sore spot on her stainless reputation as a medic.

There is also the fact that Sarada will sneak around and do whatever she wants anyway, no matter what her parents order her to do. A sliver of pride flickers in her chest at the realization that her father has already anticipated all of this.

If the Kazekage had eyebrows, one of them would be raised.

“Are you sure? This is your family vacation.”

Sasuke snorts softly and Sarada hides her smile behind her hand.

“Yes. We were getting bored anyway.”

It’s not necessarily true, but Sarada knows that her father wants to avoid further inquiries when the matter is already settled inside his mind. Thankfully, the Kazekage seems to understand this as well because he only nods once and rises from his seat.

“Then I will summon you tomorrow morning so that I can relay all the details to all three of you.”

Her father nods and turns on his heel, as if about to bolt from the office. But he stills just when Sarada was readying to jog after him. Sasuke throws a glance over his shoulder, lone eye scrutinizing the room at large.

Sarada tries to follow his field of vision and sees Shinki, still as a statue and strikingly paler behind his cloak of black sand.

It is as if Gaara can suddenly read her father’s thoughts. The man’s mouth twitches into something Sarada is half afraid is a smirk and marginally inclines his head in Shinki’s direction.

“Shinki, please accompany them around the village. I must speak with Kankuro urgently.”

“Yes, father.”

Sarada’s confusion must show on her face because her father places a hand on her back and guides her out of the room. Shinki trails after them, a little unsure in the beginning, until her father slows down enough to make it clear that Shinki can walk at their side.

Their journey down the stairs and back outside does not take long and in no time Sarada is inhaling the hot, dusty air of Suna once more.

“Where do you wish to go?” She’s never heard Shinki’s voice sound so soft. Sarada barely hears the full question.

Sasuke turns to him then, gaze considering and the boy beside her seems to shrink under its intensity. And suddenly Sarada gets it – Shinki is _fearful_ or maybe just a little _intimidated_ by _her father_.

Sarada is aware of what the general population that isn’t her, or mama or uncle Naruto thinks about her father and how they behave around him. She also finds it incredibly hilarious because whenever this happens and she tries to imagine what they must be thinking, images of her doofus father and all the times he’s been nothing more than a doting parent cloud whatever fearsome image her brain manages to conjure and leaves her incredulous.

But Shinki must see something she doesn’t because the boy’s cloak of sand is getting a little agitated at the edges.

“Somewhere to eat first. Then to the training grounds.”

Shinki nods and turns to guide them in a seemingly random direction.

Sarada’s eyebrows climb behind the rims of her glasses. It’s not that she would refuse the opportunity to train with her father, but this idea feels like it came out of the left field. Though judging by what transpired earlier, it might be that her father is already starting to prepare himself and Sarada. But why would he take Shinki along?

Another moment passes before she makes the right connections. Sarada realizes why her father stopped in his tracks back in the Kazekage’s office, and why he looked back to Gaara slightly askance.

Maybe he was asking for permission, or maybe he was contemplating the benefits of urging the boy to come along with them. Maybe he wanted to shake the Kazekage’s son out of his fearful stupor because now Sarada’s mind finally makes sense of her father’s mindset. The poor kid looked bad when the discussion ended, and he still must be pretty shaken by the notion that his country is on the brink of a very dangerous and painful situation.

Her father must want to try and get these complicated adult things off Shinki’s mind.

There is a spring in her movements when she takes the next step, which gets the attention she’s been searching for from both her father and Shinki, but her teasing grin is only directed at the former.

Sasuke huffs as he redirects his gaze elsewhere and Sarada transforms her short giggle into a good-natured hum. She enjoys teasing her parents like every other child, but if she exaggerates, her father’s vindictive side might rise upon her on the training ground and the last thing she wants is to make him uncooperative.

Shinki guides them into a small family restaurant owned by a very old woman and her numerous children and grandchildren. Sarada does not dare ask how Shinki first came upon the establishment, but they are as warmly greeted as he is.

The interior is crowded with small tables arranged in a random manner under the low ceiling filled with fans that provide a cooler temperature than the raging hellscape outside. They are invited to take off their shoes and even though both Sarada and Sasuke are hesitant to do so at first, they find that the floor is heavenly cold and offers relief to their tired feet.

On the walls, rugs from different regions, trinkets gathered from the numerous tribes that dot the Land of Wind’s territory and an insane amount of paraphernalia, that is obviously handmade by the four generations living under this same low roof, are scattered around the room. Sarada’s never been to such a homely restaurant in her life. Even the one she visited in the Iwagakure doesn’t begin to compare. There is such a comfortable atmosphere here that Sarada forgets, for a mere moment, the hardships these people will have to endure because of the whole water fiasco.

Shinki really outdid himself.

Even her father seems content with the location and patiently suffers under the close scrutiny of the young children swarming around their table.

At first, they only offer Shinki attention – asking him strings of questions without pausing for breath and commenting on things that happened since he last visited. But their short attention spans shortly switch targets from the main guest to his companions and Sarada finds herself in the same position. She does her best to answer all their inquiries, but her father is a private, silent person who has a hard time entertaining so many young minds at once and he is soon lagging behind, mouth glued and without answers.

Sarada slips a smile behind her open palm, watching as the children each try to get the attention of the mysterious quiet man in their home. They do not see the thin sheen of sweat gathered on her father’s brow, nor the way he struggles to answer all their questions. His visible eye keeps flitting from child to child, as if watching out for an incoming volley of shuriken and trying to defend against all of them at once. But her father is better at taijutsu than he is at speaking, which is why it is so funny watching him fumble.

Shinki seems better now that warm food and cold drinks are placed in front of them and Sarada exhales quietly. He’s never seemed so much like the fourteen year old boy he is until now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have this whole thing written out so chapters will come quickly if i manage to beta them in time


	3. Day 3

* * *

**_Sarada's tip:_ ** _Accept the fact that things will go wrong, especially when you are a shinobi._

_But if you don't - then be ready to do something about it._

* * *

Sakura places the vial on the desktop and slides with her chair to the other end of the table. The sample she has extracted from her husband’s water bottle sits under the light of the microscope and she peers through the lens, chest constricting with anticipation.

The moment Sasuke spit out that water, alarm bells started ringing inside her mind. Water doesn’t go bad in the sense that it starts tasting so bad you need to spit it out.

Especially not a day after you just put it there.

She is also aware that her husband has a pretty extensive background when it comes to poisons. Years under Orochimaru made Sasuke immune to all common poisons and quite an impressive array of heavy hitters.

Sakura might be able to prepare a poison in her sleep, but her husband is able to _taste it_ out of almost anything. Even the tasteless ones.

At first, she was fascinated but now she is, most of all, extremely thankful. If it hadn’t been for Sasuke, they would have consumed the infected water and probably died because of it.

The thought that this might be an attempt on their lives in particular has crossed her mind, but after they arrived in Suna, things got pretty clear.

This is an attempt on two whole countries.

Sakura loathes to imagine it, but she hardly thinks that whoever is behind this is targeting only the Land of Rivers and the Land of Wind.

No, they might have big, _big_ plans in the works. Which is why Sakura must get to the bottom of it first.

She puts away the first sample and places back another one, this time from Sarada’s bottle. Her daughter claimed that the water was alright, but this morning Sakura subjected Sasuke to another round of tasting and got the same result as the day before.

“It’s the same.” Sakura turns to the unfurled scroll to her right and scribbles her observations. “This might mean that whatever poison exists in the water takes around twenty-four hours to activate.”

People always say that it is hard to make a poison that kills instantly, but the truth is that it is much, _much_ harder to make a poison that kills a person hours or even days after it has been administered. Evading suspicion is easier when you aren’t in the same village as your target anymore.

Such a slow poison is hard to design, especially when it is targeted at basically everyone. Every human body is extremely different, so to concoct a poison that gives the same _symptoms_ to everybody is mindboggling.

Sakura makes a mental note to send Lady Tsunade a message as soon as she finishes identifying the poison. She needs a second opinion on this matter before proceeding forward. She has a niggling thought that this particular enemy will be rather hard to crack, even with all of her experience.

“Uchiha-sensei?”

The harried doctor in the doorway is clutching a clipboard to her chest. Her hair and ruffled clothes remind Sakura of her own appearance after a rather wild shift at the hospital.

“I am here with the report on the patients suffering from food poisoning.”

Sakura nods and accepts the clipboard with a smile. She shuffles through the papers with practiced ease, eyes narrowing the further ahead she goes. After five whole minutes of reading, Sakura sighs and snaps the papers back into place.

The sound rattles through the room and makes the middle aged woman standing in front of her jump.

“Nothing.” The medic nin murmurs, offering the documents back. “None of them did anything special,”

The doctor blinks at the small smile spreading over Sakura’s lips.

“But they all drank tap water.”

“Could it be a virus after all?”

Sakura mulls this over, absently biting the inside of her cheek as she thinks.

“To engineer a virus is a thousand times harder than to engineer a poison. And to give these specific symptoms…” She trails off, unsure.

Viruses are still defined on an abstract level, even with the rapid progress of technology. If there isn’t a specific jutsu at the bottom of this process, then it is practically impossible. And Sakura has never seen nor heard of such a jutsu, but shinobi can muster many incredible feats when they are motivated enough.

Still, “We are talking about two outbreaks at the same time, in two very different places that are far away from one another. At this point I’d rather bet on the water.”

The Suna doctor nods, a grim line to her mouth and brow and excuses herself out of the office.

Sakura lets her head fall back and her eyes rest on the cream ceiling of the lab room.

Everyone drinks tap water. And if they don’t, those fancy filters that are all the rage nowadays have no chance of standing against this kind of poison. Everyone is at risk. These bastards are targeting the water supply of whole countries and obviously aim to kill each and every one of its citizens without much care or thought otherwise.

“Nothing but a high-quality genocide.”

* * *

Sarada spins on her foot and launches a high kick at the small blob of black sand that advanced dangerously close to her head. She jumps back afterwards, tomoe spinning as she looks out for the next attack.

Shinki was – dare she day it – _deliriously happy_ at the chance to spar with her father. It was a strange sight indeed. Silent as he is, he was obviously in awe the whole first five minutes before her father had planted Shinki’s scrawny ass on the ground. And still, there were a few stars shining behind his gaze, totally unsuited to the unruffled expression on his face, but Sarada has enough experience with stubborn, headstrong boys to know what to look for.

Since the Suna shinobi had already kicked Sarada’s ass two years ago at that disastrous chunin exam, she knows that he had expected to achieve the same result now. Sarada was only too happy to prove him wrong.

She spots her father’s shadow slinking between two boulders at the farthest edge of the training ground, but she knows that he can get in between them in a second if he wants to.

The black sand Shinki controls slinks over the sandy terrain of the grounds surprisingly fast, and Sarada jumps just as it reaches her previous spot on the ground. Spinning her body to aim at the source of the slim line of sand, her hands fly through the hand seals for her clan’s signature technique. The ball of fire flies true, but it dissipates against Shinki’s shield and she grits her teeth.

She needs another strategy and fast.

Sarada lands on the ground and takes shelter under a narrow crevice of a red rock boulder. She weaves a simple genjutsu to make her as insignificant as the boulder she is propped up against. Most gazes would pass by her, but she knows that Shinki will be fooled only for a few precious moments. Still, it will give her ample time to make her escape.

Closing her eyes, she thinks upon her strategy. There must be a way to break through that barrier. Shinki’s sand moves fast, and she doubts that she has the speed to pass through. She needs to find a good distraction then.

_No_ , Sarada opens her eyes, sharingan blazing. She needs to be able to make both her father and Shinki _distract each other._ That might easily work with Shinki, but her father is a seasoned shinobi that sees through all her plans. He is too perceptive and too in tune with the world around him to-

Sarada’s train of thought abruptly ends and her eyes widen. The idea that just popped into her head due to her earlier thoughts might seem stupid, but she is onto something. Big, flashy distractions are what her father expects her to show up with when she launches an attack, and his sharingan and rinnegan also provide a foolproof against any genjutsu. But that’s only if he knows to look for them.

Still in her earlier genjutsu, Sarada casts another one, a few meters away, in the direction she’s seen her father going. This one is the bait and also the scapegoat. Her father will dispel the illusion of her footsteps echoing and the hem of her shirt disappearing behind a rock. But he will undoubtedly follow the trail because his interest will be piqued.

Sarada moves carefully, steps soft as she navigates to look over the rock.

Shinki’s sand still slithers on the ground, searching for her and it’s closing in.

Shadow clones are Boruto’s specialty but that does not mean he has the monopoly on it. Sarada can hold her own well, but her limit is two clones at her current chakra levels. She will have to do with those and maybe pull some transformation jutsu a couple of times to confuse them.

Sarada sends one shadow clone running on the edge of the small training ground and, true to her instinct, Shinki’s sand goes after it. In the meantime, Sarada slips away from behind her spot. She ducks and weaves through the numerous boulders scattered about, using them as cover as she tries to keep out of Shinki’s sight.

Meanwhile, her clone does her best to avoid being dispelled. The real her makes it close enough to be able to attack when the time will come, and she leaves the second shadow clone behind along with the genjutsu she cloaked herself in earlier.

Then she slips away and enters the fray, giving Shinki enough clues to guess what her strategy of attack is. Which is exactly what Sarada wanted to achieve. This strategy she led Shinki to intuit is a rudimentary plan of attack and the easiest in the book – which is, incidentally, the first on the list of possible strategies.

Sarada bites back a self-satisfied smirk. She stayed around Shikadai long enough to be able to reinterpret some of his brightest strategies.

Her father takes the bait. Memories of the short fight between him and the clone she left behind the boulder filter in Sarada’s mind as she continues to weave in and out of Shinki’s immediate range. She runs through three short hand seals and slips into another simple illusion. It is nothing impressive, but it is just good enough to trick people’s perception.

The movement of Shinki’s sand suddenly becomes aggressive. Sarada figures that the boy must have spotted her father and is preparing a salve of attacks as well as defensive movements.

Sasuke seems to be tired of slipping through the shadows and attacks head on. His sword is drawn but he keeps it low as he jumps through the loops Shinki’s sand leaves behind. Her second shadow clone is dispelled when she defends against her father and comes much too close to the iron sand. 

The real Sarada bares her teeth, kicks up a cloud of dust and announces her presence with a battle cry, hands flying unseen through the seals for a transformation jutsu. Her father’s sword curves in her direction at the same time that his Chidori erupts along the metallic sand and towards Shinki.

The Sand shinobi lets the affected sand fall away, halving his defence and letting himself open, even if for just a moment.

By that point Sarada has used her kawarimi’s shadow to navigate nearer, propping a foot in the slippery ground to launch herself forward when the last fragments of sand fell away. Her sharingan never leaves Shinki’s form and it’s almost two whole seconds before her doujutsu catches her one and only opening.

_There!_

Her transformation makes a valiant effort to dodge, yet her father’s sword slips through and dispels the trick, but he is too late. Sarada is already half a step from Shinki and gaining. The boy’s eyes widen when he realizes his defence will not be complete in time to properly dodge.

Sarada’s fist flies past her face and her shout reverberates through the grounds.

“ _Shannaro!_ ”

A thin sheen of sand barely catches her fist, half an inch from Shinki’s face. The boy’s hand is lifted towards her, obviously in an effort to spurn his sand to move faster. She heard rumours that this technique – as the Kazekage’s – can be controlled better if you use your hands to direct it with.

They stop like that for a moment. The cracks are deep in the shallow shield and they fall away under their gazes. Shinki seems shocked at the turn of events and Sarada uses his distraction to grab his hand and throw him over her shoulder.

His breath is knocked out of him when he lands on the ground. Sarada pins him with one knee and smirks at the slack jawed kid.

“That’s revenge for the chunin exams.”

She barely has time to catch her breath. The sound of a sword sheathing has her springing up into an attack position, but her father is done with training for today. He catches her eye and nods, though Sarada can see that he is very pleased with her display of skills. Her chest expands with pride and she smiles brightly.

“Good job.” He glances down at Shinki and adds. “Both of you.”

Shinki picks himself off the ground, hesitant to make eye contact. Sarada feels a little bad for him. The kid only wanted to show off his skills to this legendary shinobi.

She finds herself nudging Shinki with her shoulder, a teasing smirk playing on her lips.

“My win today, but I’m sure you’re gonna show off even more tomorrow.”

Sasuke grunts, no doubt realizing what she’s doing. He goes to retrieve his cloak from the ground where he discarded it earlier because heat and training do not mix very well.

The boy’s painted eyebrows shoot up, no doubt taken aback that there will be a next time. Hesitantly, he nods, gaze dancing between her and her father’s retreating back.

“How many days are you staying then?”

The question surprises Sarada, but she answers nonetheless.

“A couple more days.” She says with a shrug. “Depends on what mama discovers about the poison.”

“We should go meet up with your mother.” Her father has already donned his cloak and is moving away.

Sarada squints against the setting sun, wondering about the exact time. She walks behind Sasuke with Shinki at her side.

“Do you think mama is already done?”

“No.”

Her father’s answer discourages her a little. She’s sure her mother must be extremely tired after such a long day, but she knows that Sakura will not rest until she gets to the bottom of this mystery.

“But I don’t expect this matter to be solved so easily anyway.” She looks up at the words. Her father is cloaked in shadows as he walks on the badly depicted pathway that will bring them back in the city. “We should pick some food for her on our way to the hospital.”

Sarada agrees easily. All the way back to the hospital, she keeps sending Shinki curious glances. He doesn’t seem inclined to return to his father’s side, but she wonders what his real mission is. Most probably to watch them and make sure they don’t do anything suspicious. Even if they are treasured guests, this is a shinobi village no matter how peaceful times are. Their movements will surely be monitored.

Her mother appears in the empty hospital reception hall with tired eyes and a dishevelled appearance that speaks volumes to the workload she’s had to deal with today. But the smile on her face is sweet and she is genuinely happy to see them.

“How was your day?” Mama asks as she gratefully accepts the box of takeout her father offers. She sits down with a groan and eats while Sarada details their time in the city in vivid detail.

The Kazekage appears sometime during the climax of Sarada’s retelling of their training spree and he patiently waits for her to finish while her mother bites down on the last of her meal.

Shinki slinks to his father’s side, morose and half pouting at the reminder of his failure. In contrast, the Kazekage holds a small smile on his face.

“It seems that you had a productive day.” He turns his head towards her mother and his smile drops. “How is it looking, Sakura?”

Her mother heaves a sigh and leans back in her seat, eyes slightly downcast.

“I am not going to lie to you, Gaara. This is bad.”

Something in her voice makes fear take root in Sarada’s chest. Her mother is the second most optimistic person out there after uncle Naruto. So, if she proclaims that things are bad, then things are _really bad._

“I have a hard time isolating the poison, mainly because there is hardly any trace of it. Whoever made it, they knew what they were doing, and they spent a lot of time perfecting it.”

“Then a crisis is imminent.”

Sakura’s mouth thins. “On the other hand, I managed to lessen the symptoms of those who are sick. I am confident that this provisional treatment works, at least for the moment.”

“So they will not die like those in Tanigakure did?”

Her mother winces slightly at the reminder. “No,” hope flickers in Sarada’s heart, but it sinks just as fast, “not yet.”

Everyone turns to her.

“I assure you that I am doing everything in my power to save them, but without the means yet to create an antidote-“

“I have no doubt about that.” The Kazekage is grim, but there is no blame aimed in her mother’s direction. “Sometimes we do everything in our power, yet we cannot do anything. Did you find out why these people in particular are exhibiting symptoms first and foremost?” 

“Yes, that was easy. They drink a lot of water during the day. Since their intake is so big, they are the ones who were affected first.”

Gaara nods decisively and crosses his arms. “I already explained the situation to the council and a decision was therefore taken. Sunagakure will begin regulating the water consumption effective tomorrow. There will be rules that every citizen will be required to adhere to.”

Her mother scrubs a hand over her tired face. A few wisps of pink hair slip from her messy ponytail.

“This will be almost impossible – water is the most important amenity in everyone’s lives.”

The Kazekage’s mouth has almost disappeared from how much the man is pressing his lips together.

“We have to conform, or everyone will die.”

The declaration leaves a bad taste in Sarada’s mouth. She cannot imagine what her parents or the leader of Suna might be feeling right now. She can’t begin to imagine what is going through Shinki’s mind right now either.

“I spoke to Sasuke this morning about a certain matter and I wish to relate the details to you as well. Please come by the office on your way to the hospital tomorrow morning.”

Her mother nods silently and any further discussion is tabled until the next day.

Sarada drags her feet all the way back to the hotel, stuck in the curious feeling between mourning the great vacation they had planned and being excited at the twist this mission took. Granted, a sensible person should be scared out of their mind by now, but it is hard to be overcome by such a hopeless feeling when she walks next to her parents. Her trust in them never wavered before and Sarada is certain that between them, uncle Naruto, uncle Kakashi, aunt Tsunade and the other Kage, this matter will be solved sooner or later. The problem now is preserving their strength and devising a good strategy.

Which is why Sarada heads straight to bed when she arrives in her room, hoping for a good rest in preparation for tomorrow’s mission debrief.

* * *

DAY 4

“What!”

The dismayed shout comes out of Sarada’s mouth as soon as Kankuro stops her from entering the Kazekage’s office.

“But I’ve been here yesterday, too!”

“Look kid-“

“Let her in.” Her father’s voice is deceptively calm, but the cold undercurrent is descriptive enough.

Gaara’s brother slips a glance to the Kazekage, who for once seems to be hesitating.

“I thought that you’d wish to send Sarada back home.”

“Why would we do that? She’s safest when she’s with us.” Her mother rejects the idea at once and Sarada’s cheeks fill with warmth.

The Kazekage’s mouth quirks upwards. “I would have offered the aid of a Suna shinobi, but as you wish. My apologies, Sarada.”

Sarada offers a small smile in the form of a truce and settles herself in her previous spot next to the wall. Her mother steps up to the Kazekage’s desk, a frown marring her soft features.

“What is going on?”

Gaara tells her everything. He repeats what he said to her father yesterday, never losing any of the details. By the end of his speech, her mother is burning with unrestrained fury.

“Then we need to find these bastards.” She says through clenched teeth.

Her father grunts in tacit agreement.

“Your husband did volunteer your,” Gaara’s mouth twitches again and Sarada’s brows climb on her forehead with confusion because she doesn’t understand why this is so funny to him and she might never know, “ _team_ to go and look for them.”

Sakura nods, determined and with a steely glint in her green eyes.

“But I have a better proposition for you.”

Sarada’s back unglues from the cool wall and the girl takes a few stilted steps forward.

“We need to find an antidote for this poison first and foremost.” The Kazekage begins, gaze meeting her mother’s. “That is the most important objective. From what I understood yesterday, the poison is difficult to differentiate from the rest of the liquid mass.”

Her mother nods. “I already sent a letter to my master. If she won’t be able to help, I hope that she will at least provide a fresh perspective.”

Gaara’s shoulders drop. “Yet, it might take a while until it reaches Lady Fifth. For that matter, I took the liberty of contacting the Mitsukage and explained the situation. The Land of Water’s history is filled with tribes and factions using water and poisons liberally and they might be the most versed in this field.”

“That might work.” Sakura says, delighted. “Did they agree to help?”

“Yes, but unfortunately it is risky to send you to the Land of Water under these circumstances. Whoever is behind this might be looking out for such attempts. A team of Suna ANBU have already been dispatched to look into the terrorists’ current whereabouts. What I need is to find a reasonable place where you can meet with the experts from the Land of Water without risk of being spied on.”

Sarada hears her father shift impatiently, though she only manages that because she is standing so close to him. Sasuke is doubtlessly trying to temper his agitation as new information comes to light. Sarada has a feeling that her father is not as pleased with Gaara’s plan as her mother seems to be.

But then again, her father is more inclined to search out the culprits and is used to leave the burden of healing the wounded to someone else – in most cases her mother. Now he’s relegated in the same category as the medics and he feels restless and useless the more the mission parameters shift from search and locate to solving the problem with the poison.

This – this is so _not_ her father’s specialty, but if her mother decides that this is what they have to do first to make sure no more innocent people die, then Sarada is pretty sure that he will do everything in his power to help.

“Do you have something in mind?” Her mother’s voice interrupts Sarada’s musings. The young girl sees the four adults in the room crowd around an open map on the desk.

“No,” Gaara grimaces, a strange emotion that doesn’t seem to have any place on his face. His finger taps a rhythmless rhythm on the yellowed paper, “do you?”

Sasuke backs out and straightens his back, out of ideas. There are numerous possible remote locations in the Land of Tea, but it would be too tedious to scour them out to be sure. It would take time that they do not currently possess.

Sakura, on the other hand, looks up and grins. “I think I have the perfect location. But I have to talk to Naruto first.”

Both Sarada and her father throw her questioning looks that make Kankuro cackle and Gaara smirk, but her mother is too concentrated on the logistics of her idea to really notice.

The call to Konoha takes a long time to connect, and when it does, they are greeted with the image of the Seventh Hokage slurping instant ramen from a cup. His eyes shoot wide open at the screen in his office, currently showing his two best friends and their daughter, along with Gaara and Kankuro.

“Hello, Naruto.” Gaara greets amiably, not in the least concerned that his friend is in the middle of his meal.

“Naruto!” Her mother lowly hisses, no doubt glaring in the Hokage’s direction. Sarada tilts her head and catches her inaudibly mouthing something else at him.

Sarada’s father lets out a long-suffering sigh and mutters under his breath. “Idiot.” 

Seemingly realizing that this is not a dream, Lord Seventh gulps down the food in his mouth and hurries to deposit the meal somewhere out of view. This in turn causes his arms to bump into the other many objects scattered on his desk. Empty ramen cups clatter, papers fall to the ground and there is the sound of something breaking before her uncle’s face fills the whole screen. The man’s smile is genuine but sheepish, and he’s rubbing the back of his neck like Sarada knows he’ll do when he’s nervous.

“Y-Yo!”

The rather casual remark makes Sakura bristle. A string of expletives filters through the speakers and Sarada figures that the culprit is probably Shikamaru-san. Put in a tight spot, the Hokage does what he does best – _deflect_.

“Uhh, you guys me caught me at a pretty bad time, y’know! I mean, it’s fine I can talk – I was just, uh, taking lunch. Um, anyways! Why did you call me all of a sudden? And not on the phone to booth! Man, I was really surprised, believe it! Still am! _Huh?”_

Uncle Naruto’s blue eyes narrow into slits as he studies something on his screen.

“’What the hell am I doing-‘ What are _you_ doing! And also – _I’m trying my best to start a conversation, y’know?!_ ”

The Hokage’s face colours and Sarada watches with amusement as it disappears to collide with the surface of his desk. Several more objects clatter deplorably.

Her father’s eyes are closed, and he is fighting hard to keep his cool. Sarada sees that her mother clearly isn’t inclined to have the same compunction.

“Naruto! Shut the hell up!”

A small pause punctures the beat between this and the reappearance of uncle Naruto’s face. His lips are stretched into a pout.

“Sorry, Sakura-chan.”

Sakura’s hands are on her hips and she is tensed in the customary reprimanding position. It makes Sarada wince.

“Naruto,” the sanest of the lot, and also the Kazekage, begins mildly and not in the least disturbed by their antics, “please listen to this.”

In the next few minutes, Sarada watches as her lovable uncle’s face slowly loses any humour. A serious mask slides into place, half hidden behind the Hokage’s steepled fingers.

“I see. Then it might be prudent to start our own round of tests.”

Her mother agrees at once. “Please tell everyone at the hospital to follow Mayuri-san’s directions. She’s lead expert on poisons when I’m not there. Did you hear anything from shishō?

Naruto’s head turns as he shuffles through some documents.

“Yes, a letter from Shizune arrived yesterday afternoon. She said that they are on their way back to Konoha.”

“She must have received _my_ letter then. Good.” Sakura exhales, a hand resting on her forehead. “She can take charge of the medic corps.”

“Oh, she’s going to be _ecstatic_.” Uncle Naruto mumbles behind his palm before he shines a bright smile upon them. “Alright, so what’s the plan?”

“We need a secluded, impenetrable, undetectable and risk-free place to meet the envoy from the Land of Water.” Her mother lists off the list of characteristics as if she’s not describing the place named ‘Nowhere’. With every adjective, the twitch in uncle Naruto’s temple becomes more prominent.

“S-Sakura-chan…” The Hokage trails off, unsure what answer to offer his friend and not make her incredibly mad.

Her mother takes pity on him because she waves a dismissive hand. “I already have somewhere in mind. I just need you to call ahead and tell them we’re coming.”

Uncle Naruto lights up like the million colourful bulbs at one of Konoha’s many festivals.

“ _Really_?!” The man gasps and Sarada draws back because he looks two seconds away from trying to enter through the screen. “Where?!”

Her mother lifts Gaara’s map and points to something that Sarada cannot see. There is a leery smirk on her face.

“I was thinking somewhere around here.”

* * *

Her uncle had the right idea when he asked her parents if they are suddenly hit with a round of the insane. He’ll do well to watch his back when her mother comes back home, but until then, he promised to speak to the right people as soon as possible.

As promised, Shikamaru-san does return with a call over the telephone, announcing that the right authorities have been informed and that they are expected.

Sarada hears of this at the end of that day, freshly showered after another round of training with her father and Shinki. Bored and definitely not in the mood to explore, Sarada decides to take her book with her and keep her father company.

Inwardly, somewhere deep inside her soul, Sarada admits to herself that she is shaken by what happened and will happen, and she doesn’t feel like being alone right now. So, she settles in her parents’ bed with a book while her father tacitly makes more space for her.

They read in comfortable silence for a while until her mother bursts through the door out of breath, but less frustrated than she was yesterday.

“I did manage to devise a better treatment plan.” She explains after a quick trip to the bathroom. “If they stay strong, they might have a chance until we find the antidote.”

“Hm.” A water bottle is trust in her mother’s face. She eyes it critically. Her father rolls his eyes. “Drink.”

Sarada hides her smile behind her book.

Her mother’s next words are soft. “Everything is ready, and we are scheduled to leave in the morning. Gaara and Naruto already gave the ok. We will meet with an envoy from Konoha in the Land of Tea, from where we will take the ship to the Land of the Moon.”

Sarada’s brows jump at the ridiculous name, until she remembers that she might have read the name in some Academy schoolbook.

“I can’t wait.” Which, most surely, means that her father would rather swallow glass. “Did you also tell the dobe about the-“

“Yes, dear.” Her mother pulls a face. “I’m not sure if the others will agree, though.”

“Naruto will deal with it. And if not…” Mismatched eyes narrow, as if her father could kick his best friend’s behind over the distance. 

Sarada has no clue what they are talking about, but at this point she is too afraid to ask, so she settles back on her oversized pillow and resumes her reading until she hears the door to the bathroom close.

“Are you alright, honey?”

Her mother draws the bangs over Sarada’s forehead behind her ear. Sarada sees her uncertain smile and moves to melt against her mother’s side.

“I’m fine, mama.” Her sigh concerns her mother a little, but Sakura remains silent, waiting for Sarada to continue. “Just tired.”

“I’m sorry that our vacation is ruined.”

Sarada snorts and buries further into her mother’s shoulder. It hasn’t felt like a _family_ vacation from the get-go anyways. Sakura was at the hospital all day and they only saw her in the evening. The only time Sarada could really spend with her mother was en route to the next location. So she isn’t as disheartened by the fact that their schedule is gone to hell. Rather, this might be the opportunity to have both of her parents near like that whole family vacation promised.

“It’s fine.” Her words are slightly slurred because her mother’s warmth and her scent are driving Sarada to the brink of sleep. “It was getting boring anyway. This is _way_ more interesting.”

Her mother huffs a laugh and pats her on the back, urging her sleepy form to bed. Sarada half-heartedly wonders where this Land of the Moon is located exactly, but she falls asleep before she has time to formulate any theories.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	4. Day 5

* * *

**_Sarada's Tip:_ ** _Parents should explain the trip in careful detail and offer travel journals to their kids._

_But if they don't - at least ask them for a ride on their giant summon hawk._

* * *

When they told her that they have to go to the Land of Tea first, Sarada didn’t realize until very late that they had to pass over a body of water. Namely, the Bay of Fire – a mass of water isolated from the main ocean and nestled in between the Lands of Fire, Tea, Jungles and Rivers.

Their journey takes them from Sunagakure at dawn. The Suna shinobi guiding them lead the Uchiha family against the rising sun, slightly eastward and towards the point of juncture the Land of Wind forms with its neighbours. From there on they walk on the borders of the Land of Rivers and Land of Jungle until they hit the bay.

It dawns on Sarada sometime after her eyes finally adjust to the bright sky and the sparkling blue water in the distance that she hasn’t heard any plans about taking _two_ boats. But just as she is about to open her mouth to ask, questions burning on the tip of her tongue, her father bites his thumb and presses his palm to the ground.

From a thick curtain of smoke, a great hawk with sprawling wings materializes before them.

“Garuda,” her father rubs the hawk’s beak in greeting, “this is my family. We need passage across this water.”

Sarada thinks that she imagines it, but for a moment the hawk bows his head more deeply before he straightens and unfurls his long wings. They pile onto his back, Sarada sandwiched between her parents, with her father at the front and her mom in the back to keep Sarada from tumbling off and drowning.

It takes them almost three hours, and by the end Sarada swears off flying for the rest of her life. Her mother tried her best to keep a conversation going, but the howling wind in their ears made it hard to concentrate. After those failed attempts, Sarada tried her best at sightseeing, but you can’t do that for very long when the only thing you see is _water_ sprawling in all directions and nothing more.

So, when Garuda touches the ground, Sarada all but jumps off and shakes her legs to get her blood flowing properly again. Her father thanks his summon and dismisses him shortly.

“Where are we?” As she asks this, her eyes are drawn to the thick canopy of leaves and the familiar sounds of a forest.

“At the border between the Land of Fire and the Land of Tea.” Her mother answers easily as she stretches her back.

“We have to traverse this region to get to the port.” Her father continues, gazing over the dim forest floor critically. “Let’s get going.”

They assume the standard formation as they travel through the trees and then over a sprawling field with grass almost as high as her. It takes them the better part of the day to reach the halfway point, so they camp out in the forest that night.

Sarada watches the millions of stars splayed above her head with wide eyes, as her father takes to pointing them out and her mother berates the Academy board of teachers who eliminated star navigation out of the curriculum.

They make the next stretch of the journey in record time, and by the time lunch rolls around, they are on a hill overlooking the port and the village nestled at its base. The envoy from Konoha is nowhere in sight though, so they settle down and Sarada eats some of the rations they stocked back in Suna, her gaze drawn to the picturesque landscape.

Soft grass sways in the balmy breeze coming from the open ocean. Sarada spots fishing boats floating on the calm waters. The village at the foot of the hill is tranquil, yet more often than not a scream penetrates the otherwise silent forest edge they sit upon.

“The sun is so nice here!” Her mother’s content hum brings a smile to Sarada’s face. She turns as well, closes her eyes and lets the warmth caress her face.

They wait like that for a good while – long enough that her father is ready to leave, Konoha envoy be damned. Her parents almost have that argument, but they are saved from the useless fight by the team from Leaf finally arriving.

“Yo.” The sound of a book closing behind her makes Sarada jump to her feet, but when she turns there is only uncle Kakashi standing there, a smile behind his mask.

From the corner of her eye, Sarada catches her parents turn in their teacher’s direction. Her mother holds a tolerant smile, though her fist is clenched in a white knuckled grip. Her father, on the other hand, openly glares at the former Hokage with poorly concealed animosity.

Uncle Kakashi is unperturbed.

“Sorry we’re late. The path of life is a mysterious one as usual.“ 

And he says this completely unrepentant.

“You should solve that mystery before I solve it for you, _shannaro_!”

A bead of sweat travels down the side of Sarada’s forehead and she nervously smiles at this small peek of her mother’s explosive temper. A large palm falls on her hair and Sarada angles her head to find her uncle’s eyes twinkling playfully. It has such an underlying effect on her that she finds herself grinning back at him.

“Let’s head out then.”

Her father hadn’t even finished his sentence when two more people drop from the branches of the trees behind them.

“Sakura-san! Sasuke! Sarada-chan! A thousand apologies for being late!” Rock Lee bows in a straight angle for one hot second before he straightens and offers them his signature smile and a thumbs up.

Her mother giggles and returns the man’s greetings, but Sarada catches her father pinching the bridge of his nose in exasperation. Then her gaze alights on the last person of the ground and she finds herself gawking hopelessly.

“Wh-“

“Hello.” The white haired boy turns a smooth and blank expression from her father to her mother in one fluid motion.

He is dressed as unimpressively as possible in a pair of black pants and a dark grey shirt. Sarada’s eyes narrow on the crest of her clan, neatly displayed on the fabric on his back.

“Tamanegi, you are here! I’m so happy to see you.”

Frustratingly, her mother offers a hug to the pale boy and he awkwardly accepts it, even as he smugly replies with a “Me too, mama.” that has Sarada stepping forward without another thought.

She draws up next to him, glaring at the intruder over the rim of her glasses. This is the last thing she wanted – to have _Tamanegi,_ of all the other Shin brothers out there, come with them.

It is no secret that there is an army of Uchiha kids – who are actually clones – living at Konoha’s orphanage. It is also no secret that her mother makes frequent trips out there to check on the boys, bring them clothes and anything else they might be missing and make sure that they are adapting well. Ever since the Shins have taken residence in Konoha, they are frequent visitors at the Children’s Clinic and her mother always speaks of how they are making incredible progress, _each and every one of them_.

Sarada was obviously forced to visit as well, but the experience proved less horrible than she’d assumed. So, she’s gotten to know them little by little and she is quite sure of herself when she says that Tamanegi being here has just destroyed all her hopes at a peaceful time spent with her parents.

Her cousin from a tube offers her an unimpressed glance when he sees her approaching.

“My mama.” Sarada raises a finger to make her point, overwhelmed by a toddler’s tendency to establish boundaries.

She hears her mother huff and is aware that she knows that Sarada _does not like_ Tamanegi’s attitude and his usual demeanour. But he is also one of the only three other Shin boys who have decided to enrol in the Academy – made possible by _her mother_ signing them in, of course – and become Leaf shinobi. They fast tracked everything in one year and they are full genin and pissing her off nowadays.

At least Tamanegi is. Imo and Ninjin are cool.

“What are _you_ doing here?”

“I know you wanted one of my brothers to come, but the officials chose me.” Tamanegi returns, almost mockingly and Sarada grits her teeth.

“Listen here-“

“Enough of this.” Her father’s voice cuts in smoothly, ending her rant before it ever began.

Sarada pouts. Tamanegi’s face clears of any emotion.

“We are wasting time.”

Sasuke throws Kakashi a _look_ before he turns on his heel and starts to walk away.

Uncle Kakashi briefly touches his head band, sighing tiredly as if he isn’t already used to such a scene.

Conversation only starts when they have embarked. Huddled in a corner on the deck, well away from the prying eyes and ears of the other passengers, Sakura turns to Lee-san with a smile.

“I was really surprised to see that Naruto sent you and Kakashi-sensei! Well, we didn’t know who will be coming anyway.” Her mother laughs sheepishly.

Lee-san smiles and crosses his arms over his chest.

“I was just as surprised! But it seems that Naruto-kun decided to reunite the original team after all these years.” His eyes tear up and he clenches a fist. “It was an extremely emotional moment!”

Sarada is taken aback by the exuberant man. She’s never much interacted with him and Metal is so much quieter than his father. Rock Lee is just like condensed energy shoved into a human body and it almost makes her teeth ache.

“Actually,” uncle Kakashi intervenes before her mother can formulate and answer to _that_ , “the king explicitly asked for us to come. Unfortunately, Naruto was unable to leave the village on such short notice, but another visit with the royal family of the Crescent Moon Kingdom is imminent.”

Sarada lifts her eyebrows, incredulous. She doesn’t understand what they are talking about. A quick glance at her father shows him silently looking at the foamy crests of the waves hitting against the hull.

“I see.” Her mother holds a wistful smile. “Well, I cannot say that I’m not glad to visit after all these years, but I wish that it was under better circumstances.”

Instigated, because she is burning to know everything, Sarada asks.

“So you’ve been to the Crescent Kingdom before, mama?”

Her mother nods and draws her closer with an arm around her shoulders. She grins cheekily.

“Kakashi-sensei, Lee, Naruto and I went on a mission here when we were genin. We were supposed to protect the prince on his travels until he returned home, but when we got to his castle we ended up in the middle of a civil war!”

Sakura and Lee snicker and uncle Kakashi shakes his head, eyes distant with fond memories. A giddy kind of amusement tickles in Sarada’s fingertips and makes her release a laugh. She’s always so curious to hear more about the time when her parents were genin.

“Of course, the problem was solved perfectly!” Lee-san grouses and her mother throws him a raised eyebrow, accusing and amused at once.

“Well, each one of us almost died only twice on that mission, so I do count it as a win.” Uncle Kakashi does not hesitate to voice this dry remark as he returns to the page of his orange book.

“How long until we get there?” Tamanegi destroys any opportunity for Sarada to ask more. She sends him a sharp glare, but the boy resolutely looks to her father.

“We should be there by tomorrow morning.” His murmur is so low that it’s almost snatched by the breeze.

Her mother’s arm tightens around Sarada for a moment before she lets her go and stars fussing over their dinner plans.

* * *

DAY 7

The Crescent Moon Kingdom is a vast sprawling island that folds inwardly, towards a large bay area with blue-green waters. The port is set on the outer lip, carved out of stone and filled with fishboats and expensive yachts.

Sarada openly gawks at those, because she’s never seen such fancy boats before. They look made for pleasure more than work, and people with expensive clothes and sparkling jewelry climb confidently aboard their vessels, ready for a day of relaxation.

Sarada would be envious, if she didn’t think that this is an exaggeration.

Their group is whisked off from the entrance into the city by a large white carriage, decorated with filigree in shapes of leaves and flowers and animals. The man guiding the horses opens the small door and ushers them in before he likewise jumps on the bench attached at the front of the vehicle and spurns the horses onwards.

Sarada takes the time to study the lively city passing by the window, full of people and vibrant colours, the streets decorated with flowers and flags. Most tumble from open balconies, from buildings with a foreign architecture. But there are some propped up on tall poles, flying against the wind and proudly displaying a blue moon.

The city melts into a dense forest road, but it takes less than ten minutes until they pass through a set of iron wrought gates and the palace towers rise to meet them.

Sarada considers the opulence of the palace, the magnificent display of wealth in an artistic, spiritual manner, something that the blunt and edgy architecture back home contrasts. It is beautiful, but it is also organized, clinical and most of all, spotless.

She doesn’t have to ponder how a group of three thirteen year old kids and uncle Kakashi would stick out like a sore thumb. An image of uncle Naruto flashes through her mind then, and it is convincing enough for her to picture a disaster zone and the future Hokage right in the center of it.

“Welcome, everyone!” A middle aged man with a large sweet smile and slightly round cheeks saunters out of the palace, closely followed by a throng of servants and guards.

“King Michiru. A pleasure to see you again.” Uncle Kakashi bows in respect, followed by her mother and Lee-san. Sarada shoots a glance at her father and follows their lead when he does the same.

“My friends! You are always welcome here!” The king waves a hand, urging them to look up. “I am so happy to see you again.”

“We are as well!” Her mother replies pleasantly and turns to a man with round glasses on the king’s right. “You’ve grown up so much, Hikaru!”

“Indeed Hikaru! The power of youth is burning bright in you!” Lee-san strikes a pose. “As does in Michiru-san. It makes me get all fired up as well!”

The man laughs and says something in return, but Sarada is more interested by their easy rapport. They speak like old friends, yet time and distance barely seems to have mattered where they are concerned. Sarada wonders how much more boisterous this reunion would be if uncle Naruto was here.

Her musing are interrupted when her mother materializes at her side.

“And this is our daughter Sarada.”

Sarada hastily inclines her head, but the king and that man Hikaru are all wide smiles and surprised exclamations.

“Thank you for allowing us to hold our meeting here.” She hears her father say, but her eyes are drawn to the fine silks and deep blue fabrics the king is dressed in. They swish silently with every movement, and the golden embroidery glitters under the sun.

“It is of no consequence. At the very least, I am sure that if anything were to go wrong, these guys can take care of matters.” The king laughs knowingly, and the team sent here twenty years ago joins in. “Please come in! We arranged a welcoming banquet for you.”

“There was no need…” Uncle Kakashi begins, modest as per usual. He looks decidedly tense, but maybe it is just because he remembers another time, when this place wasn’t as friendly.

Sarada trails after her mother while her father stays one step behind with Tamanegi in tow. In all the action this morning, she managed to forget about the boy’s presence, but now she is rudely reminded of it when he starts asking her father something about the castle’s design.

The giant room they are ushered into is half open to the sky. A long table travels its length, filled with a myriad of different meals, all arranged in a tantalising manner. Sarada gulps back at the sight, the small breakfast she had on the ship now a long gone memory.

A cool breeze ruffles the tablecloth as Sarada takes her place between her parents. Her mother sits next to uncle Kakashi, who sits on the king’s right while that man Hikaru sits on the left, with Lee-san and a troop of people that look like palace officials.

“Kakashi-san, don’t be so modest!” The king’s smile is wide. “I heard that you hold the title of the Sixth Hokage now.”

Uncle Kakashi heaves a long-suffering sigh under his mask.

“In my defence, I did vote against myself, but everyone else voted for me so.”

Hikaru and the king laugh good naturedly. Her mother giggles behind her hand.

“How is Naruto?”

“Still as full of energy as always!” Lee-san reassures, clenching a fist over his plate.

“He hasn’t changed much from when he was young.” Sakura grins, leaning back in her chair. “Still as loud as always.”

“He does have a lot on his plate right now, being Hokage and all.” Uncle Kakashi adds mildly. “But I’m sure that he will do everything in his power to find the time to visit you. This place has certainly changed from the last time we were here.”

“It is less deadly, that’s for sure.” Hikaru jostles, earning an affronted look from the king.

“Hikaru! Don’t bring back those crazy memories.” The older man throws his head back and clutches at his chest. “My poor heart can’t take it!”

As if designed to prove him wrong, a large saber-toothed tiger prowls through the room, making a beeline for the newly arrived guests.

Sarada’s first instinct is to jump on her seat, but she refrains at the last second and instead decides to remain glued to her seat. At another look, no one save from maybe her father and Tamanegi seems to be concerned that a large and dangerous animal walks around unchecked. A small monkey jumps on the table in front of Hikaru, tittering and stealing fruits from the overflowing bowls.

“There you are, Kiki-kun! You barely changed since we’ve last seen each other.” Lee-san pats the monkey on the head and the small animal swishes its tail in a friendly greeting.

“I’m glad to see that these two are doing alright.”

Sarada startles at her mother’s voice and bites back a yelp when she looks to see that the tiger basically has its head in her lap. Sakura rubs behind its ears and the animal purrs happily.

Despite the fact that her mother is now infinitely cooler for being friends with a saber-toothed tiger, it’s still unbelievable to Sarada that it is so friendly towards her. She catches the raised eyebrow her father throws her, but Sakura’s whole attention is on the mewling tiger.

“They hardly have place to complain, I think.” The king whines, though a smile fights to break over his face.

“Hmm, they do seem a little rounder.” Unbelievably, uncle Kakashi teases the two animals. Kiki screeches in protest and throws a grape at him.

“Nice throw!”

Sarada struggles through the meal as she strains her ears to catch every bit of the conversation going like lighting around the table. There comes a point when the exchange of replies stutters and the chirping of the birds and the crashing waves in the distance reigns.

The tiger lounged between her mother and uncle Kakashi yawns, showing his sharp rows of teeth. Sarada wonders, not for the first time, how her mother and the others managed to befriend such a creature.

“By the way, Hikaru-kun,” Sakura begins after dessert is served, “how is kingly training going?”

Hikaru visibly cringes, face crumpling as if asked of a particularly torturous practice. Many laugh at the sight.

“Please do not remind me.” The man hangs his head in dismay.

“Remember Hikaru, you can’t be a prince forever!” Lee-san pats him hard on the back. It dawns on Sarada then, that her assumptions were wrong. Hikaru is not an advisor or anything, but actually the prince of this country.

“Your face says it all, but if it’s any consolation, Naruto did sport a similar expression while he was preparing to take over as Hokage. So you aren’t alone.”

The mere mention of the Seventh Hokage causes Hikaru to smile and shake his head. “I’m glad that someone shares my pain, after all. Naruto better make sure to visit when this is all over.”

“Speaking of which,” the king raises his head from where it was resting on his open palm. He looks to uncle Kakashi as he asks, “I understood the basic idea, but what exactly brings you here?”

Uncle Kakashi exchanges a glance with her mother and she nods in return.

“What brings us here today is a growing international problem on the continent.” Sakura is the one to answer the question. The king’s eyebrows jump on his wrinkled forehead. “The water system in both the Land of Rivers and the Land of Wind has been compromised.”

“What?!” Hikaru’s face loses a couple of shades as he leans forward in his seat. Next to him, Lee-san nods with an unusually grim downturn of his mouth.

“A terrorist organization liberated a poisonous substance in the water system of both countries.” Her mother explains, tone professional and brows furrowed with the gravity of the situation. “Unfortunately, against my best efforts, I was unable to isolate the poison in order to fabric an antidote. Lord Kazekage contacted the Land of Water and asked for the assistance of several experts in water-based poisons. The truth is that I was the one to suggest this island to Naruto as the safest meeting point.” Her mother inclines her head. “Thank you for agreeing with this and I apologise for any inconvenience we created.”

“Come now, Sakura, that’s way too formal!” The king waves a hand in friendly dismissal. “I’m very happy to offer my palace for your meeting, there is absolutely no problem!”

“Actually, it’s an honour to hear you say that.” Hikaru smiles proudly. “I kept trying to make time to contact you guys, but life always interfered. Now you gave us the chance to finally start a dialogue with Konohagakure and the Land of Fire.”

Uncle Kakashi hums in agreement, eyes crinkling at the corners.

“When will the meeting take place?” The king asks, somewhat more subdued now that such dreary matters have come to light.

“We received word from the Land of Water that they will be departing today, so they will probably be here by tomorrow. I assume they will be brought to the palace as well?”

“Of course.” Hikaru agrees readily. “All preparations are already completed.”

“I will be participating in this meeting, if it is alright with you, Sakura. I think that it is better to be informed on this matter.” The king says, finally digging into his portion of ice cream fruit cake.

“You are welcome to attend, of course. I believe that it is important to share all that we can with each other at this stage. Despite the Crescent Kingdom being surrounded by ocean water, those terrorists’ objectives remain as of yet unknown. There is always the danger that they will attack this place as well.”

The royal family does not seem reassured by her mother’s words. Rather, Sarada see them even more fretful, but this is normal, she supposes. They are civilians and they are living very far away from any kind of conflict. If anything was to happen now, who knows if they will be able to overcome it by themselves.

* * *

Sarada finds the tower by mistake, though it _is_ pretty close to the main building that she would have to be blind not to see it.

Her parents said that they were going to the beach, but Sarada was in no mood for walking in the slightly damp and cool sand now that the sun is disappearing behind the horizon. So, she decided to stay behind with uncle Kakashi, Lee-san and Tamanegi, but the former two joined the king for a drink in another fancy saloon and Sarada refuses to be aware of Tamanegi’s whereabouts out of principle.

The tower sports a seemingly endless stairway that climbs steadily towards the sky. It seemed dauting at first, but Sarada squared her shoulders and took it one step at a time, sometimes two steps and before long, her hair was wiping at her face as the powerful wind blew over from the ocean.

Her eyes had locked on the beautiful sight and remained that way ever since.

Now it is nearing half an hour since she’s been out here, but Sarada is determined to wait until the sun completely disappears from view. Out beyond the two rock faces that stand like sentinels before the lapping waves of the ocean, the waters are a fiery red orange cast in gold and outlined in deep violets. A fireball not unlike her _katon_ , the sun is barely half a disk now and descending languidly behind the thin line of the horizon.

Another day has passed and Sarada wonders not for the first time today if they are on the right path. She has no doubt that her parents and the Kage know what they are doing, but the whole situation seems too out of the blue and too on the nose for her paranoid instincts not to make her double check.

Sarada remembers then that her father is the personification of paranoia, so he must have triple checked. This somewhat mollifies her, even as a frustrating feeling of hopelessness rears its head in the back of her mind. On such large scale problems, she feels less than useless.

The fact that everyone keeps making sure to remind her that she’s just a kid does not help. But it at least absolves her of any reckless move she will pull from this point forward because if Sarada is sure of anything, it is that she won’t stay behind when a fight slinks on the horizon.

She heard whispers, and uncle Naruto did say to Lord Kazekage that they must avoid another large scale conflict at all costs. But how could they do that when they don’t know what they are fighting against yet?

“Oh, there is someone already here.”

A man’s voice pulls her out of her spiralling thoughts and Sarada looks back to find the prince, Hikaru, standing at the top of the stairs. Then her eyes narrow behind her glasses, because standing at his side is Tamanegi.

The boy’s face twitches and melts, leaving behind an ugly look like he just swallowed something bitter. His puckered lips make Sarada’s blood boil, so she concentrates on Hikaru and offers a small smile.

“My apologies if I am intruding.”

Hikaru laughs and waves his hands in a negative gesture.

“Not at all!” His eyes are drawn to the amazing tableau of colours in the distance and he sighs wistfully. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

Sarada nods, turning back to observe the landscape.

“I thought you would be on the beach with mama and Sasuke-san.”

Because her mother might be ‘mama’ for the Shin brothers, but her father remains with a name and an honorific since they are still pretty wary of him.

Sarada watches critically as the boy comes close to the stone handrail and rests his hands on it. He never once turns in her direction.

“Wasn’t in the mood.” The girl mutters, hoping the kid would take the hint and leave her alone.

Tamanegi might be an idiot, but he is insanely smart. And he also doesn’t like Sarada, but instead of keeping away and not bothering her, he prefers to keep on pestering, as if that would win him something else than a black eye.

“Well, it certainly was a better decision to come here.” Hikaru comments airily, not sensing the tension between the two or probably choosing to ignore it in favour of not ruining the moment. “This is my favourite place to retreat after a long and stressful day.”

On any other occasion, Sarada would simply nod and leave silence to reign, but today her interest is piqued. Not only because this man is the prince, but he also knew her mother and uncle Naruto when they were young. This man is a source of information that must be exploited.

“So, prince Hikaru, you knew my mother, uncle Naruto and the others when they were young right?”

It’s as if a lightbulb is flicked on in the man. A large grin stretches over his face and what was formerly a drained expression molds into an excited one. Sarada didn’t think it would be this easy – because in the case of her parents, she has to tug on their tongues with pliers in order to get anything out of them about the past – but prince Hikaru begins to recount his adventures with mama and her team when they helped the Crescent Moon Kingdom survive through a civil war.

Or rather, they helped and protected the future king and his son after the late king died. They beat the shinobi assassins that threatened to blow up this kingdom. And they were considered heroes on this island, at least by the royal family.

Sarada feels the familiar pride that always squeezes her heart at the mention of her parents’ feats. They might not be the stories she craves most – the ones from the war, those filled with impossible plans and wild twists and daring attacks. But it is enough to keep her on her toes and by the end of the story, Sarada is grinning.

She thanks the prince, but there is no need. Hikaru is just as reverent of the past as Sarada seems to be.

A servant calls him back to the palace a short while later, citing an urgent meeting with his father and as he takes his leave, Sarada is left with only Tamanegi for company. Which is something she always tries to avoid for the best of their surroundings.

She does try to be civil tonight, if only because she does not want to disgrace her family’s image.

Tamanegi never moved, nor did his face flicker with any identifiable emotion through the course of the story. And now he looks in the distance, eyes never wavering from the canopy of stars.

“Mama was always amazing.”

The observation takes her by surprise. Swallowing down the caustic comment that rises in her throat, Sarada instead opts to offer a wordless hum in agreement. She needs to find a way to work together with this kid, otherwise she’s at risk of being cut off from the mission and that is the last thing that she wants to happen.

“Why were you with prince Hikaru?”

She hears Tamanegi shift his head to glance at her before he answers.

“I was wandering around the grounds when we crossed paths. He wanted to show me an awesome place.”

The kid doesn’t seem exalted by the result, but Sarada cannot say that she is proficient in reading him. Many of his brothers have managed to learn how to use facial expressions and emotions, but Tamanegi is a rather hard nut to crack. But then again, it is probable that he is doing it on purpose.

“Ah.”

They lapse into another silence that quickly transforms into a competition of who’s going to break first. Sarada will be damned if she says something and falls first, but surprisingly, Tamanegi opens his mouth after ten whole minutes.

“I am not going to get in your way on this mission. And I would like to ask that you do the same.”

Sarada releases an unladylike snort.

“Deal. Not that I would try to be petty and risk getting thrown off this mission. So let’s be clear,” she turns to him then, one hand resting on her hip while the other taps a mindless rhythm on the rough stone of the tower, “I don’t get in your way, you don’t get in mine. And after we finish this, we can go back to disliking each other all we like.”

Tamanegi nods heavily, like his head started weighting a ton. His deep black eyes are unnerving just because they are so like hers and papa’s. But his features are all wrong and he seems vaguely like a ghost in the dim light on top of that tower.

Sarada watches him slink off into the darkness until she is sure that he isn’t there anymore. Just like a ghost.

* * *

DAY 8

King Michiru prepared the biggest council room in the palace for the day’s important meeting with the representatives from the Land of Water. In other words, the space is an amalgam of all the representative treasures contained in the Kingdom, gathered tastefully and displayed on the walls, the equally expensive furniture or the floor.

They gather two hours before lunch and the promise of a fruitless meeting hangs in the air from the beginning. Sarada sits in a chair next to Tamanegi, both teens strategically placed at the other end of the table. Two gruff guards that seem to have been placed on the Kiri team just out of principle slink across the distance from the two Uchiha children.

The representatives from the Land of Fire sit on one side at the other end while the freshly arrived envoy from Kiri has taken residence opposite them. At the head of the table, king Michiru, prince Hikaru and the head of the guards sit in a semicircle, facing both parties.

Her mother clears her throat and begins speaking in the professional tone Sarada has heard a thousand times before.

“We are incredibly thankful for your prompt response.”

“The matter is alarming enough to require fast action.” The leader of Kirigakure’s representatives replies heavily. His face is scarred and his hair is wildly green, but his eyes are the colour of honey and the shine like molten gold in the sun. “Mizukage-sama explained what little he was told of the problem. He mentioned that we are dealing with a case of poisoned water systems.”

Her mother nods gravely. “That is correct. Both Tanigakure and Sunagakure have confronted with the same problem. This is the little I was able to collect about the poison before we left Suna.”

She pushes a thin scroll to the middle of the table. The green haired leader offers a smile full of teeth that Sarada genuinely believes wants to be a confident look and not the sight of someone baring their sharp, pointy teeth.

He picks the scroll but doesn’t make any move to read it. Instead, he hands it to the brown haired woman sitting next to him. She has softer features and such blue eyes they are almost white. They narrow into slits the farther she reads through the scroll.

Finally, she looks up with a tight set of lips. The leader takes this as confirmation on some level of a previous understanding they have because he turns around and says.

“It seems that our greatest fears have been confirmed.” His statement makes Sarada’s blood turn to ice. “We are dealing with a water-based poison. We of the Suidoku clan have been dealing with such substances for many generations.”

“Can you expand on that, please?” Prince Hikaru asks before her mother can speak.

“The Suidoku clan has a history of fabricating poisons for Kirigakure and the Land of Water.” The last member of the envoy, a wild haired woman with three deep lines cut into her pale, slightly blue skin, takes over for her companions. Her teeth are the same sharp rows as the man’s, but her eyes are slanted and a muddy green that clash with the red bangs hanging around her face. ”We are the masters of assassinations and our services have been employed almost as long as Kirigakure has been established as a shinobi stronghold. That is why the Mizukage sent us here. If there is anyone with enough knowledge and history with poisons, it is our clan.”

Many people around the table nod, silently waiting for the woman to continue. Sarada silently observes that her father’s visible eye is narrowed on the group in front of them.

“Any guesses you can make about the poison from the data I gathered?” Her mother clasps her hands on the table in front of her, gaze never wavering from the Kiri trio.

The brown haired woman who read the scroll shrugs.

“At the moment, not much. From your records, I can confirm that the poison is water based, meant to work slow which takes quite a lot of effort and creativity. But from what Lord Kazekage has reported, the poison brings about the same symptoms in everyone, which is not necessarily strange, but it is harder to replicate in all subjects.”

“Indeed,” her mother cuts in, eyes going hard, “everyone is different. Some bodies are weaker, and some are stronger. What concerns me the most is that it begins as a mild case of food intoxication, but it suddenly develops into internal bleeding and death in a few hours.”

“It makes sense, though.” The red haired woman starts. “The water’s journey through the body is through the stomach and then on to the kidneys. It is absorbed and it is purified.”

“Most probably the body can fight against the poison at first.” The man adds, crossing his arms over his chest. His brows are furrowed deeply. “Most records and from personal experience, I can tell you that the majority of slow working poisons can be eliminated, especially if they are not in the blood.”

“They took a great risk making a slow acting poison that can be ingested.” His brown haired companion agrees.

Her mother’s head lifts in comprehension. “I see! The reason this appears as a mild food intoxication is because the body is fighting against the poison. The stomach is affected first and it is a good distraction. It took me some time to realize that the digestive system is only the first problem in a long line.”

The red haired woman releases a strange sound that Sarada thinks might be a giggle, though it sounds as a low hiss. The gills on her face move imperceptibly while she speaks.

“They are sneaky, indeed. There are scarce traces of this poison in a regular measure of the infected water, but their strategy hinges on the citizens regularly consuming it because people need it to live. And there is no way to avoid drinking it.”

“You can drink bottled water, though.” Hikaru remarks. His face is devoid of any of the kindness and softness Sarada glimpsed yesterday. Instead, a painfully stern expression sits on his face.

“How are you certain that they haven’t already targeted those factories, though?” The man from Kiri asks bluntly. His bright eyes are criticising.

Hikaru has no answer.

“Whatever the case, we must go onwards with the assumption that everything is infected on the continent.” Her father’s voice breaks through the wavering pause the prince left in his wake. “From rivers to lakes and the underground water systems, all of them are at risk of infection.”

“Wouldn’t this poison also affect animals?” Uncle Kakashi shifts in his seat. His shoulders droop as if he’s suddenly carrying a great weight on his back.

“Oh, certainly!” The red haired woman immediately confirms. “Poison does not discriminate.”

“Then we must move fast.” The former Sixth Hokage declares tensely. “It will cause a lot of unrest, but this crisis can only be overcome if we work together.”

The Leaf shinobi nod and after half a second, the Kiri envoy bow their heads in acquiescence as well.

A natural lull in the conversation follows, during which Sarada allows herself to relax a little. Next to her, Tamanegi is as still as a statue. She is slightly unnerved by this, because it is not _normal_ to have no muscle moving and no finger twitching under normal circumstances. Right now, it is almost incomprehensible to her that the boy next to her has absolutely no reaction to everything that is being discussed in this room.

“Uhm, I have a question.” The king of Crescent Kingdom sheepishly lifts a finger and glances from the Leaf to the Kiri shinobi. “What is a water-based poison exactly?”

Her mother opens her mouth, but the brown haired woman from Kiri beats her to it.

“It means that whoever our enemy is right now altered the water molecule and made it more receptible to assimilating the poison inside itself. This can make the poison basically undetectable.”

“But it is also an incredibly hard thing to do.” Sakura admits, clasping and unclasping her hands. “Usually such a thing is possible without powerful chemicals, expensive equipment and an incredible amount of patience.”

The brown haired woman hums noncommittally.

“In the olden days, you had to have a lot of luck on your side and a very good handling of a special jutsu, but the newer technologies are opening new doors just by existing.”

Her mother’s mouth tightens into a worried line. Sarada spots uncle Kakashi slightly shake his head, a sigh escaping through his lips. In contrast, her father and Lee-san are incredibly quiet, which is slightly unnerving in her father’s case and downright strange in Lee-san’s.

King Michiru’s face is a little greener than it was a few minutes ago, but Hikaru only holds a determined look in his eyes.

“Nevertheless, the Suidoku clan’s help will be indispensable in the next few weeks.” Uncle Kakashi says seriously and Sarada has been around him and uncle Naruto long enough to know that this is a very good diplomatic strategy to win the Suidoku clan on their side.

A little flattery goes a long way, especially when prideful shinobi are the recipients.

The man on the other side of the table puffs his chest, obviously mollified by the compliment. The red haired woman raises an eyebrow and smirks, but remains thankfully silent. Her brown haired companion inclines her head politely.

“And we shall do everything in our power to help you find an antidote.”

Her mother likewise bows her head and smiles diplomatically. “I look forward to working with you.”

Murmurs from the Kiri natives return her well wishes.

“We should be heading to the laboratory. There is no time to lose.” The red haired shinobi suggests and king Michiru jumps to his feet much more nimbly than Sarada would have imagined him to be able to.

She knows that the Crescent Moon kingdom holds a state-of-the-art laboratory somewhere near the city center. From what her mother told them, it easily rivals Konoha’s facilities so there should be no problem in getting all the necessary materials to make an antidote work.

Sarada only hopes that they will be able to do that before it is too late.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> right so i lied about the chapter count  
> but don't worry i fixed it


	5. Day 8

* * *

**_Sarada's tip:_ ** _Avoid family arguments as much as possible._

_But if you can't - try to minimize the devastation, both international and personal._

* * *

“We should have a plan laid out in any case.”

Sarada looks up to her father with a curious gaze, but he is concentrated on uncle Kakashi who sits on the other side of the table.

They took a late lunch, after which the king retreated to his quarters and Hikaru joined them on one of the castle’s many terraces for a drink and conversation. It is obvious to figure out that her father is restless, and that his patience is wearing thin.

But it’s been barely three hours since her mother left to the lab and they probably have a lot of time to waste ahead of them until she and the team from Kiri manage to analyse the poison and find a way to neutralize it.

Uncle Kakashi seems to be of the same opinion because he sighs loudly and leans back, arms crossed over his chest.

“What do you propose, Sasuke?” The older man asks, deciding to humour his former student.

“Mos-“

“We don’t even know where they are.” Uncle Kakashi states, a little forcefully. Her father’s mouth snaps shut and he glares at his former teacher.

“It doesn’t matter where they are-“

“What, you suddenly have a universal plan for all situations?”

The glare deepens. “Going without a plan is worse than going in with a slightly crooked one that can be ironed out later. But I know that you dislike having a strategy so I shouldn’t have bothered.”

“Uh uh _uh_ ,” uncle Kakashi clicks his tongue and waggles a finger at her father, “I used to have plans, but you three weaned me out of the habit by never listening and doing whatever the hell you wanted. And now you’re here telling me we need a plan when Naruto’s been doing things by the ear for years and _you_ are here telling me this and making me think that _I’m_ the crazy one.”

Sarada glances from papa to uncle Kakashi and back again, afraid to intervene in the rare quarrel where she finds herself an onlooker. On papa’s other side, Tamanegi looks bored as he rests his cheek on his closed fist.

“I agree with Sasuke-kun, Kakashi-san!” Lee-san all but yells from the other side of the garden. His hands are full of small platters and he walks to the table at a fast pace. “There is never a bad idea to have an action plan.”

“Speaks the pot to the kettle.” Uncle Kakashi groans and throws her a helpless look. “Sarada, please stop your father from his endless impatience. I can’t handle it in my old age.”

“Kakashi,” her father growls, the simple word sounding like a death sentence hanging over the former Hokage’s head.

“Papa,” Sarada’s voice comes out in a whisper when she looks at him pleadingly. Her father immediately deflates with a half-hearted exhale.

Uncle Kakashi seems partly shocked that his plan worked, and he makes sure to throw her a wink when Sasuke isn’t looking. Sarada grins slyly and rests her head against her father’s stump proudly, which makes Sasuke mellow down into a contemplative silence while her uncle looks at her appraisingly, as if checking out with interest a new jutsu she developed and mastered.

“I am aware that it is not exactly my place,” prince Hikaru begins, throwing her father a cautious glance, “but I suggest that you wait at least for the preliminary results. After that, you can start devising a plan.”

“We also have to wait for Gaara’s report tonight.” Uncle Kakashi gently reminds Sasuke when he remains unmollified by the prince’s suggestion. “Based on what he will tell us, we can start thinking of our next move. After we speak with Gaara, we need to contact Naruto and, most importantly, Shikamaru. I believe that it is in our best interest to hear what the latter has to say.”

“Alright, fine.” Her father scowls and lets the subject go, though Sarada thinks, with a hint of pride, that he did that if only because arguing more would drive her back into her seat sooner.

* * *

The first thing her mother does when she enters the throne room is find them, take her father’s hand and refuse to let go. This is wildly unusual for them, especially because Sarada knows that they – or rather, her father – are not prone to many public displays of affection, especially in front of a crowd this big. Which brings Sarada to the unsettling conclusion that her mother must be pretty shaken by what she found out about the poison.

And if her mother is like this, the concerned glances her father keeps throwing in his wife’s direction make Sarada even more anxious about what is to come.

Uncle Kakashi gives his former student a few minutes to pull herself together before he announces that they are ready to place the call to Suna.

The throne room holds a wide screen, secured to the wall in a golden frame made of wood and placed over a large re-enactment of a duel carved in white stone.

As such, they have to stand a few feet away and Sarada thinks that the placement is not wrong, considering that there are many warrior souls crowded in this overly expansive room right at this moment who would love to take a crack at the screen, should it bring bad news.

The team from Kiri stands at attention, faces devoid of any expression and eyes on the flickering screen.

After a few moments of quiet unrest, Lord Kazekage’s visage finally appears on the screen.

“Lord Kazekage, we have new developments on our side.” Uncle Kakashi announces without preamble.

Gaara nods and answers in a carefully controlled tone of voice. “As do we. Please proceed first.”

Her mother takes the lead then, offering a general outlook on the poison they _finally_ managed to identify, but are still struggling to completely isolate from the water molecules it clings to.

“We believe that the base compound of the poison is an organic molecule, also modified but we still have to properly put a name to it.” The red haired woman offers the general assent from Kiri’s side. “We need more time.”

Lord Kazekage’s gaze is unreadable. Sarada thinks that he is measuring the pros and cons of agreeing to such a thing, but she is quickly proved wrong when he opens his mouth.

“Unfortunately, I don’t think we have that much time left.”

Lee-san and the representatives from Crescent Kingdom gasp audibly. Sarada suffocates on the sudden tension.

“The cases are multiplying by the hour,” Gaara speaks before the room can implode, “and the death toll is steadily rising.”

“What about the preliminary treatment I devised? Doesn’t it work anymore?” Her mother’s hands are balled into fists and she’s scowling, as if Lord Kazekage told her that he refuses to take her advice.

“It works for a while, but not on everyone. People with frailer bodies have a day at most. And it’s not just in Suna anymore. All five great nations have reported an outbreak in the number of cases, and we’ve received letters from the smaller villages as well. Same symptoms, same outline of the illness, same cause of death. Water systems are closing down and the poison has been found in lakes and in the ocean.”

“Do you mean-!” The green haired man from Kirigakure interrupts, sweat dripping down his face. “Kirigakure, too?”

Lord Kazekage nods grimly. “Rivers from the Land of rivers effuse into the ocean. The Mizukage decided not to rule out sabotage. These terrorists could have easily entered the country and poured the poison right in. It does not help that the Land of Water is ninety percent water anyway.”

The envoy from Kiri bow their heads, obviously struck hard by the string of bad news.

Sarada’s mind can only repeat the horrible news over and over, and it hits her soon enough that this problem reared its head in Konoha, too. She prays that her friends are all healthy.

“Then we have no time to lose.” Her father’s voice rings out over the awful atmosphere. “If it’s everywhere, then it will be here soon enough.”

His words make king Michiru release an undignified sound while prince Hikaru’s eyebrows draw into a deep frown.

“We need to take action now.” Sasuke insists, shooting uncle Kakashi a pointed look, which is grudgingly assented to.

“You will.” Lord Kazekage agrees. “A Kage meeting has just concluded before you called. The unanimous decision is to give you everything we have managed to gather and send you on your way while we deal with the fallout out here.”

Gaara pauses and reaches for a piece of paper.

“The team of Suna ANBU sent to locate the headquarters of the terrorists ended up collaborating with Iwa ANBU and managed to narrow down the area to the north-west of the Land of Earth.”

A map replaces Gaara’s face then and a pointer maneuvered by someone off screen points to said area, circling over and over two lands in particular.

“These are the Lands of Mountains and Mountain Streams.”

“Huh, kind of self-explanatory.” Lee-san breathes, eyes wide as saucers.

“The two ANBU squads followed the suspects until they broke through the border with the Land of Vegetables, but it was obviously a deflection. On the northern edge of the Land of Earth, Lord Mifune informed us that a platoon of samurai almost managed to capture one such a person twenty kilometres out of the Land of Mountain Streams, but he committed suicide before they could stop him. We are currently waiting for the final autopsy report, but at first glance he was not in the Bingo Book or had any kind of bounty on his head.”

The map falls to the middle of the screen and Lord Kazekage’s face partly returns. The man’s mouth is set in a grim line and his forehead is creased with worry.

“We might be dealing with unknown variables. Do not let your guard down. First and foremost,”

The map lifts again and the pointer moves to the north-west of the Land of Wind, circling something in one corner.

“The team who will be sent to infiltrate the enemy hideout will have to pass through here. From the Gulf of Wind, there is a Secret strait – named as such as well – where passage is only possible with explicit approval from me or the head of the Land of Claws. Unfortunately, the man is barely cooperative, so you will have to pass through while keeping as close as possible to the Land of Wind’s border. In the case that you are marked as trespassers, you will have grounds to defend yourselves. Next,”

The pointer inches slowly upwards.

“After you pass and enter the inner sea, you must avoid the Land of Claws at all costs. Suna ANBU teams have been sent to secure passage through the Land of Birds and from there on, you will pass through the Land of Honey and Forests. There is a Mountain Strait between there and the Land of Vegetables. Once you pass it, you will be on your own.”

“Why the longer route?” Uncle Kakashi asks curiously and Sarada can see why. The most obvious route would be straight through the Land of Earth.

“We must do everything not to arouse our enemies’ suspicions. Going through the Land of Earth will guarantee your protection and safe passage, but they will also probably see you coming from miles away.

The Tsuchikage was certain that this organization goes deeper than just the small countries surrounding Iwa. We might not even completely snuff it out, but we don’t have the means to anyway. Right now, it is critical that we obtain an antidote and stop them from doling out more of this poison.”

The shinobi in the room nod in understanding. Sarada frowns a bit, trying to make up her mind. The strategy is good and it’s everything they can ask for considering the circumstances, but-

“Isn’t it also a possibility that they might have spies in these smaller countries too?”

Lord Kazekage’s gaze turns to her, considering.

“That is also a possibility, but smaller.”

So it’s obvious why this plan has been chosen. Sarada wills herself to nod and tries hard to hide her dismay and the way her stomach roils at the thought of such a long, roundabout journey. It also does not help that she doesn’t really know what to expect out of any of these countries.

Her father’s face is set in stone when he agrees, “Understood.”

“What was exactly decided at the conference?” Uncle Kakashi sighs heavily, deciding to bite the bullet first.

Gaara clears his throat, uncomfortable to be put in the position.

“All the Kage agreed to let Uchiha Sasuke and his chosen team handle the infiltration and find the terrorist cell. Meanwhile, Uchiha Sakura will continue to collaborate with the team from Kirigakure and devise an antidote.”

“I refuse.”

Sarada jumps at the volume of her mother’s voice. Lord Kazekage is speechless with surprise, as is the rest of the room here in the palace.

“With all due respect, lord Kazekage,” Sakura begins, eyes narrowed as if she is heading straight into battle against the whole world, “but I will not leave my husband and the kids to infiltrate into enemy territory _alone_. The team is incomplete without a medic nin, the enemy deals in heavy poisons and I am the only one who can accomplish the job of keeping them alive.”

Uncle Kakashi sighs and makes to say something over king Michiru’s exclamations. Likewise, lord Kazekage has his mouth open. Her father’s voice interrupts them before they can get very far.

“I refuse to work with any other medic nin you pull out of the hat.” His tone is no-nonsense and a chill goes down her spine at the coldness of his words. “Sakura is the only one I trust to have my back. If that isn’t enough to persuade you, then only after the antidote is complete, we will start heading north.”

“Sasuke-“ Uncle Kakashi begins warningly, his eyebrows drawing sharply over his eyes.

Sarada’s gaze shifts from her father to her uncle and then she braves a glimpse at her mother. Sakura is looking straight at lord Kazekage, her face pulled into a determined glower, as if the poor man is the only one at fault for a decision taken by the collective five Kage. But to be fair, he does hold one fifth of the guilt.

A shrill alarm breaks through the stare down. The image flickers wildly and disappears for a moment before it comes back. And this time, the screen is split in half with lord Kazekage on one side and uncle Naruto on the other.

“Yo,” the Hokage grins, but his parents fix twin glares in his direction.

“ _Naruto_.” Her mother’s growl is almost feral.

The Kiri nin take a collective step back and Sarada is tempted to follow them.

On the screen, uncle Naruto is visibly sweating.

“S-Sakura-chan…” He trails off because the glares get worse.

“Loser, for your good you better-“

“Naruto! Why are you here?” Prince Hikaru’s excitement briefly overtakes his fear.

Lord Seventh’s face is stuck in a grimace. “I had a feeling Sakura-chan and Sasuke will give Gaara a hard time, so I decided to come help out.”

Her father scoffs audibly. Tamanegi’s face cracks and for a good moment he looks almost human.

“Then you know that I won’t budge, and Sakura won’t either. Stop wasting my time, dobe.”

Uncle Naruto shoots her father a seriously tempered look.

“Bastard, you know that’s not my call to make, believe it! The Kage made an unanimous decision-“

“I don’t recall agreeing to work under the Kage and I hardly recall pledging my undying allegiance to you.”

Sarada watches uncle Kakashi’s face steadily gain more colour, the longer her father’s words trail ever closer to treachery.

“We agreed that I will be working _with_ you, at your side and until now you respected the fact that I know better than you do how to handle things out in the field. What’s happening now? Are you letting yourself get bullied by your fellow Kage?” Her father asks derisively.

And as if this didn’t spell international incident enough, her mother lifts a threatening finger in the Hokage’s direction.

“Naruto I swear to god if you-“

“That is enough! Both of you!” Uncle Kakashi exercises his most commanding tone and encompasses her parents under a dangerously painful glower. With his mask on, the fire in his eyes is even more noticeable. “You are wasting time arguing against a decision already made and it has cost enough _lives_ -“

“Do you think we are twelve!” Sakura snaps and Sarada gently slides back. Uncle Naruto’s face is set in stone and lord Kazekage looks more and more unsettled by the moment. “This is more than running around holding hands! I’m the only one who has worked together with Sasuke in the last _twelve years_. _And you know that_ , Naruto!”

Sarada inhales sharply at the sudden reminder that despite being aware of her father’s long-term mission, she knows next to nothing about it besides its purpose. Who knows where he’s been and what he’s been hunting down. And Sarada is ashamed to admit that she doesn’t even know if her mother was ever involved in it.

For all her shaky memories that are so customary for early childhood, it is entirely possible that her mother might have, at any time, gone to help her father. It could have been any one of those short-term missions Sarada’s only gotten a few words of explanation about.

“Naruto,” the sound of her uncle’s name is enough to bring lesser men to their knees, “the _Kage_ agreed that I am the one to choose who will come with me. I asked for Tamanegi because this matter is dangerous enough to warrant a third pair of sharingan. From what I hear, these are not the usual nuke nin, but they aren’t just a bunch of ambitious civilians either. If the Kage ask me to look into it, then the situation is bad indeed. What you are saying right now is that I set off with two fourteen year old kids into unknown territory and without a medic nin. Are you possibly retarded, loser?”

Something in Sarada quivers with the question and she is suddenly uncertain. On the one hand, her strong admiration for the Seventh Hokage rears its head and snarls in her father’s direction for the disrespectful manner in which he’s speaking to the leader of their village. But on the other hand, the importance of her father’s point is impossible to disagree with.

What are she and Tamanegi supposed to do against a possible army of terrorists and without her mother’s impeccable medical skills to provide a soft blanket to fall onto when the inevitable fight leaves them broken?

How did the Kage even think to make such a decision?

“Kakashi-sensei and Lee will accompany you. And a team of medic shinobi will be sent from the nearest villages.” Uncle Naruto answers simply. All at once, his face crumbles into a very untoward grimace. “I’m sorry, _you know_! This is what everyone thought it’d be the best plan of action! Sakura-chan is the best at making antidotes and all that stuff! I also didn’t think it’d take this long to find the poison, _believe it_!”

He is possibly screaming by the end of his little speech. The Hokage’s face is all but pressed against the camera and his eyes are moisty and almost as blue as Boruto’s.

Her mother touches her forehead, staving off a possible headache.

Sasuke shoots his best friend a deadpan look that says it all.

In the abrupt silence in which everyone is asking themselves what the result of this impromptu argument will be, a brave Kiri woman raises her hand.

“Um, excuse me, if I may.” The brown haired woman who speaks is possibly crazy.

The whole room turns in her direction at once, but she barely seems to notice.

“This morning we were able to study most of what Uchiha-san gathered about the poison during her stay in Suna.” She addresses the two Kage in a measured tone. “Everything she found out she wrote down, which is not much really. And today we made another breakthrough together on this front. My team and I are confident that we are on the right track, but we find it best that we return to Kirigakure to finish our tests. So I don’t see the problem with allowing her to join her husband and kids on this mission.”

“All our clan’s records are in Kiri and our labs are better equipped.” Her male companion adds offhandedly, then half turns in the king’s direction. “No offense.”

“None taken.” King Michiru murmurs, tears crawling down his face. It seems he took the argument the worst, even if he’s not involved at all.

Something enters uncle Naruto’s gaze then, but Sarada cannot put her finger on it. Either way, the expression on his face crawls into a thoughtful one.

“Are you one hundred percent sure?”

The three Kiri shinobi exchange a glace before the man nods.

“Yes, lord Hokage.”

Uncle Naruto looks to Gaara, who looks to him given how they’re both silent, and then they both look to uncle Kakashi. The lord Sixth sighs again, this time with all his years behind him.

“How many people do you need on your team, Sasuke?”

Sarada’s never heard uncle Kakashi’s voice be so stony.

“These three are enough. If we are too many, the risk increases. If we are too few, we die.”

Either way, it doesn’t sound good to Sarada.

“Then Lee and I will accompany Asami-san and the others back to Kirigakure. They are the most critical part of this mission.” Sharp eyes slide to her father’s unmoving countenance. “Meanwhile, Sasuke and his team are free to leave.”

Uncle Naruto waits until lord Kazekage has given his wordless consent before he too nods.

“We’ll do it like this then. Try and send regular reports. Good luck!”

The two Kage disconnect and leave in their wake a tense room, divided.

Lee-san’s face is downright sad and Sarada is shaken to her core. Tamanegi stands still as a statue, but she sees the cracks deepening, becoming more prominent with each passing second.

King Michiru and his son quietly excuse themselves from the room, now without much reason to hang around sour shinobi, made infinitely more dangerous by their mood. The Kiri shinobi shuffle in their places, not necessarily intending to leave, but not fans of standing around for the aftermath either.

At the front of the room, uncle Kakashi abruptly turns around. His acid gaze takes both of his former students in and Sarada’s stomach clenches under his withering stare. Without another word, he strides away from the room. The heavy double doors close behind him with an ominous sound.

Sarada drags her feet to her parents’ side, overcome by her inexperience and the sudden animosity flitting around the walls of the palace. She reaches out to grab onto her father’s empty sleeve and her voice breaks pitifully.

“Papa.”

It makes her cringe. It makes her angry. But mostly, it makes her feel like her family just got split in half.

Sarada never stopped to consider that subconsciously, she’s been considering uncle Kakashi and uncle Naruto – and a slew of many other people – as part of her family, even when she claims that her family consists of only three people. They are her extended family, and now it feels like her parents have irrevocably dragged a knife through the mental picture, cleanly separating Sarada’s world in two.

She wants to scream.

But she remains clinging to her father’s sleeve as he stiffly intones.

“He will get over it.”

Her mother remains unmoving, looking after her former teacher long after he disappeared.

* * *

DAY 9

That night, Sarada tosses and turns and when she finally sleeps, it the dreamless, awful kind that leaves you feeling worse than when you went to bed.

She startles sometime around five in the morning with the Suna desert in her mouth and feeling like her brain suddenly weights seven tons.

Blinking groggily, she gets out of bed and pads to her room’s door. They’ve been assigned another suite in the way of accommodations, but thankfully Sarada doesn’t have to share with Tamanegi.

The door opens without sound and her foot is lifted over the threshold to step into the hallway, when her parents’ voices filter through their closed door from the room on the other side of the hall.

Sarada tries to steady herself and calm down, willing her chakra not to fluctuate wildly and announce that she’s up and eavesdropping on their conversation. Her father is too attuned to picking up minute changes in chakra patterns, but Sarada has a good enough hold on hers that she can temper it and make it seem like she’s still in bed.

Her mother’s voice is muffled, but the silence of the night amplifies it as it filters through the door.

_“Maybe we should have left Sarada and Tamanegi to return to Konoha. I’d be much more at ease knowing they’re safe.”_

_“I asked for Tamanegi exactly because I saw the need for another pair of eyes. And because Sarada needs an incentive. Playing house with Boruto and team seven is proving a distraction.”_

_“Sasuke,”_ her mother hisses, quite uncharacteristically, _“they are not living the times we lived through. There’s nothing wrong with how they’re training.”_

_“That’s what I am afraid of,”_ Sarada almost doesn’t hear her father mumble. _“Whatever the case, Naruto shouldn’t have gone ahead without consulting any of us first. Don’t get me started on Kakashi.”_ His voice is bitter and something unpleasant curls in Sarada’s stomach.

_“I know they are trying their best, but sometimes it’s like they are doing it on purpose. Anyways,”_ a loud sigh, _“I feel bad that for the things I said, especially in front of all those people. I’m so embarrassed!”_

A hum is her father’s reply. At least, that’s what Sarada thinks he does because she doesn’t hear anything for the next few seconds. When her father speaks, it isn’t anything that she was expecting.

_“They had it coming. Kakashi should learn when to keep his mouth shut.”_

_“Sasuke-kun!”_

_“I’m serious Sakura.”_ Sarada blinks when his voice gains a few decibels. _“He wants the best for us, and he wants to help, but he’s also struggling to keep to the mission parameters no matter what. And he is starting to get in the way because he’s always so conflicted.”_

_“That’s why he’s retired.”_ Her mother’s tone is bitter. _“He learned his lesson long ago. I think we should try to be more understanding.”_

_”Fine.”_ Her father accepts grudgingly. _“But we’re not paying for his reconciliation dinner if he doesn’t get over it. This is all the dobe’s fault._ ”

A snort and a giggle are the only answer and then the conversation drifts to silence.

At the threshold, Sarada wavers. She is thirsty, but she also does not want to make herself known by walking down the hall. There’s something incredibly embarrassing to be caught padding around at such ungodly hours in the morning.

Thoughts running, she silently closes the door and turns to face her dark room. Her backpack rests on the chair pulled up to the vintage vanity speckled with silver speckles and gemstones.

She probes through the baggage, praying that she still has the water bottle she purchased when they first got on the island. Her hand closes around it just as Sarada was starting to reconsider the merits of making a quick dash to the bathroom and she pulls the plastic bottle out with a winning smile.

Her thirst satisfied, Sarada returns to bed, but her eyes take a lot of time to drift back shut. She keeps replaying her parents’ conversation, down to the last sentence and their words are startingly clear to hear.

Her father finds her skills lacking, or maybe he sees that she’s not doing enough. But how much can one do when all missions are D and C graded and there’s nothing but the unusual case of crazy lying around the woods in wait. If there is anyone who is doing the most training-wise, it is Sarada and even she feels that she’s not enough.

A scowl lights her features. Then maybe her father should make the time and come help her polish her skills. She’s also been waiting for the best opportunity to ask him to teach her a new Lightning based jutsu because the ones she knows now she already mastered.

Her mother’s words take precedence then, and she feels a little justified that at least she’s feeling bad for snapping at uncle Naruto and uncle Kakashi, even though they partly deserved that. Sarada reaches to clutch at the front of her shirt and her eyes narrow on the black ceiling. The hopeless feeling crawling around her chest lessened a bit with the last part of their conversation, but she still feels wobbly and uncertain. What should she do tomorrow when she sees uncle Kakashi? All she wants is to hug him, but she’s also a little wary of him because of yesterday.

But this is the man who babysat her the most out of everyone else. Not even her mother’s parents have punched in the amount of babysitting hours that uncle Kakashi has. And not only with her – uncle Kakashi did a lot of double time, handling both her and Boruto at the same time. Now that she looks back, Sarada honestly asks herself how he’d accomplished such a feat. Because even back then, Boruto was three handfuls and then some. And Sarada was more hyperactive than she is nowadays.

Sarada drifts from one thought to the other, never staying on one thing and before long, her mind gets to the inevitable conclusion that she was very lucky earlier. Her face burns in the darkness and she scrunches her eyes shut to get rid of any torturous image because Sarada could have walked out, not to her parents having a normal conversation at five in the morning, but doing other dirty stuff that makes her want to bang her head against the wall repeatedly until the thought is exorcised.

As it is, it would attract too much attention, even thought it’d be funny to scare Tamanegi. So, she turns and buries her face in her pillow, muffling an embarrassed scream, trying to banish the horrible thought and maybe catch a few more hours of sleep.

What a way to start the day.

* * *

Morning finds Sarada dim eyed and glaring at the polished marble fountain facing the entrance of the palace. The entrance of the palace is as of yet untouched by the early sunrays and the cool stone of the stairs provide a much needed comfort against her convoluted thoughts and the journey to come.

She keeps replaying the conversation yesterday and her stomach clenches with every barbed reply exchanged between her uncles and her parents. And being a quiet genius, of course she remembers them all. In excruciating, minute detail as if she had her sharingan activated when they were talking.

Thinking back on the stressful event yesterday, maybe it wouldn’t be too far from the truth.

Sarada continues to be shocked by her mother’s complete refusal and utter insubordination, which is something she’s never seen in the woman before. Never once did her mother do anything against Lord Sixth and Seventh’s direct orders because she is usually the one backing them up. Her family was literally facing down the five villages alliance yesterday and Sarada’s never felt more scared before. What if Lord Seventh suddenly decides to dole out a punishment? Strip them of their rank?

Sarada shakes her head, anxious to dismiss this train of thought, but she just makes it easier for another to take its place. And this one is less than ideal too.

Her father’s words keep battering at her, ceaselessly and unrepentantly. He thinks that she needs more incentive, that her skills are lacking and must be stunted by the missions she takes, her training is insufficient and Sarada is quickly on her way to be a failure-

A large hand lands on her shoulder and she stiffens. Her head whips around and she finds uncle Kakashi crouched on the stairs behind her. Sarada finds him offering her one of the smiles usually reserved for when she feels scared. It is a reassuring smile, down to the crinkles on the corner of his eyes and the way his grip on her tightens for a moment before he pulls his hand away and rests it on her head.

“Are you alright, Sarada?”

She swallows convulsively, because how is she supposed to answer? There is no way to verbalize everything swimming through her head.

She nods hesitantly, even as her eyes moist over and gleam with unshed tears. Her uncle immediately catalogues all these little details and his smile melts into a concerned frown. The former Hokage moves to settle on the stair next to her, elbows resting on his thighs.

“Did something happen?” He asks languidly, as if he seriously cannot think of any instance that would warrant Sarada becoming like this.

The girl snorts and looks to him accusingly.

“Besides the colourful conversation from yesterday?” The comment quirks into a question by the end and her uncle exhales, feigning surprise as if he finally made the connection.

“Oh.”

The simple word helps less. Uncle Kakashi is usually prone to dismissals born of the immense need to protect her (or any of his other nephews) from the hateful and unfriendly ways of the world, so Sarada is surprised to hear him address it directly.

“That was quite the conference, I can agree.” The levity in his tone helps even less.

Sarada’s pointed look melts into a glare.

“It was a confusing mess that ended up with my parents almost declaring themselves traitors. They verbally attack Lord Seventh and Lord Kazekage and I’m pretty sure they would have also exchanged a few blows if they could. And I’ve never heard papa speak to you this way and mama was yelling at you and at uncle Naruto and _and_ …” Sarada’s hysterical words trail off into a suffocating silence.

“Ah, that was just a little spat between friends.”

Her glare deepens on Kakashi because she knows that he’s trying to make her feel better, but it doesn’t work.

He seems to catch on because his breezy expression melts into a serious one.

“Sarada, that was just a little argument between adults. Adults disagree all the time. I admit, typical arguments don’t usually end up turning into a screaming fest, but you have to take into account that all three of my former students have quite the tempers on them.” His hand settles around her shoulders and he pulls her into a half-hug. Sarada’s lips quiver for other reasons now. Uncle Kakashi has never been one prone to too much physical affection, but he never absconded from it when it came to Sarada, Boruto and Himawari. Rather, he gladly offers it if he think that it brings any comfort.

“That didn’t look like the typical argument.” Sarada mutters plaintively, leaning into the secure embrace.

“That’s because you haven’t seen your parents interact in any official capacity before. And not with Naruto, that is for sure.” Her uncle mutters dryly. “Trust me, it’s gotten better through the years. You should have seen them when they were genin.” He shakes his head, even though there’s a nostalgic glint of his gaze and his eyes soften.

Sarada somewhat mellows down at that because his words make sense even if there still is some uncertainty swimming through her. Uncle Kakashi’s gaze is all knowing when he tips his head back to look at her.

“You looked pretty bad yesterday.” His eyebrows rise behind his headband. “Can say the same thing about today. Were you really that worried?”

Sarada feels her face flood with warmth and her cheeks must be burning because her uncle releases a small chuckle. With a huff, the young girl rests her head against her knees.

“I’ve never seen you guys fight so bad, so excuse me if I was worried.” Sarada grouches, too immersed in her embarrassment and relief to notice her uncle’s gaze soften. “I was afraid…”

But she trails off, because she doesn’t know what she was really afraid of. Losing these bonds with her uncles, them losing their trust in her parents, the list goes on. All she knows was that there was a staggering amount of despair turning her inside out.

“Sarada,” his tone is tentative, and it takes her a moment to realize that he wants her to look at him. What she finds is the uncle who partly raised her – who let her play with his dog summons and took her to the forest instead of the park because he doesn’t have the best perception of what toys you can give to a toddler, and apparently kunai are banned from public parks with children.

“However many white hairs your parents may give me, there is no way I’m turning my back on my precious little students. Not after everything I’ve been through to keep those little shits alive all this time.”

Sarada giggles at the candour in his graphic description. His hold around her tightens.

“And even if that happens, I’m definitely not going to do such a thing to my favourite niece.”

She raises an eyebrow at the claim, mostly because she knows otherwise.

“Alright fine, first favourite above the age of twelve.”

Sarada’s mouth pulls into a grin. “Glad to hear that I beat Boruto at this too.”

Uncle Kakashi snorts as he pats her on the head. His face falls into a silly blank mask that he uses when he wants to make both a point and a joke.

“Boruto is last, don’t worry.”

A laugh escapes her then, and her relief must be palpable because uncle Kakashi pulls away and sits up. The reason for the rather abrupt ending comes in the form of both of her parents walking through the main doors of the castle at that point.

Sarada eyes their advance curiously, waiting to see what they will do. Uncle Kakashi stands with his hands in the pockets of his pants and a stony expression on his face that wasn’t there when he stood up two moments ago.

“Good morning, Kakashi-sensei.” Her mother greets warmly, though her nervousness is somewhat showing.

Her father doesn’t show the same compunction. His tone is still cold when he speaks.

“Kakashi.”

Sasuke finishes descending the stairs and then turns around, his gaze fixed on his former teacher.

“We need to talk.”

In the shy rays of the morning sun, his left eye seems to glow from behind the curtain of black hair.

Uncle Kakashi remains unmoving for a few more heartbeats before he silently descends, her mother following close behind.

Sarada does not struggle to catch their words, but by the look on her mother’s face, the conversation takes a bad turn which worries her before everything smooths out along with the crease on her forehead.

Sakura squeezes uncle Kakashi’s forearm and smiles and this time the former Hokage returns it with every bit of the enthusiasm he received. Sasuke closes his eyes, whether in resignation or relief, Sarada is still debating when the king and his escort make their appearance.

Her mother gestures her to their side and Sarada stands straight as king Michiru and prince Hikaru finish speaking with uncle Kakashi.

“It’s been a pleasure to see you again, Sakura-san.” The king smiles kindly and her mother reaches forward and clasps his hand between hers. “I hope you will visit again soon.”

“I hope to see you soon too. Next time I’m dragging Naruto here, don’t worry!”

Prince Hikaru snickers.

“You better do!”

Both then turn to Sarada and her father, heads bowed.

“Sasuke-san. Sarada-chan. It’s been a pleasure.”

“The pleasure was all ours.” Her father’s answer is smooth and without pause for thought, as if he’s used to doling out such niceties with royal people.

Sarada only bows shallowly from the waist, hoping that showing her measure of respect will exclude her from answering.

“Good luck. And please save us all.” Prince Hikaru grins knowingly and his father adds with amusement, “Again!”

Uncle Kakashi offers twin nods to her parents and something unspoken passes between them then. Lee-san’s exuberance more than makes up for it with a tearful goodbye that catches Sarada unprepared and causes her father to roll his eyes. Mama only laughs and indulges the taijutsu specialist.

Sarada offers her uncle a tight hug that catches the man by surprise, but he leaves her with a smile and a “Be careful.” and Sarada’s heart swells.

They depart the castle in the same carriage they arrived in and with the same energetic man spurring on the horses. Sarada looks at the slowly waking city as their vehicle viciously tears down the main street with a measure of sadness that she’s didn’t get the time to visit it. 

“Tsunade-shishō sent a message this morning.” Mama speaks to the carriage at large as she relays the news. ”She’s already in the middle of studying a few samples from Konoha’s water system and the team from Kiri promised to share what they learned here and any future develompents on their front.”

A satisfied smile touches her tired visage.

”Good.” Papa doesn’t offer anything but this infinitesimal input but for mama it is enough.

She beams. ”I have no doubt that they will find an antidote in record time!”

Sarada’s eyebrows climb on her forehead as something dawns on her. ”That’s why you insisted to come with us so much?”

Mama throws her a patented warning under the guise of a small glare. ”I did not ’insist’ rather than I reminded everyone what would happen should I _not_ join you.”

Sarada grimaces and accepts the words without further questioning. Her mother has a point, even if it is so very depressing. She instead turns her head and contiues to look out of the window as the city passes by the small window.

At the port they board a smaller, faster vessel, meant more for the transport of goods than people. The king has arranged with the captain of the boat to pick them up, most of all because their destination is an unusual one and they are in a hurry.

The Gulf of Wind sits on the western shores of the Land of Wind, too far away from Konoha to even imagine the distance measured in numbers. Being the biggest of the five shinobi nations, Suna sports an incredible landscape filled with sand and an unreachable western shore, if you were to leave from Sunagakure with the intention to cross the country.

Sarada is well versed in traditional Suna horror stories, mostly because it was Shikadai’s favourite card to play when it was his turn to tell. She’s heard enough about scorpions the size of buildings, their venom that could melt sand and transform it into glass and the cutting winds that would blow and uproot full houses from the ground.

That is why she is honestly relieved to hear that they are heading to the Land of the Sea, where Uncle Naruto arranged for another ship that would bring them straight to the strait.

In the meantime, Sarada keeps herself occupied by watching the sea, sunbathing and resolutely ignoring Tamanegi, and even though her mother grumbles, she still ends up joining her. Sarada eyes her father with a sly grin, but he only raises an eyebrow, a challenge and a warning rolled into one simple gesture and then resumes reading his scroll. The younger Uchiha boy with a horrendous case of pearly white skin fixes the hat her mother plopped on his head and carries on with his reading as well, trying his best to emulate her father.

It takes them one and a half day to make it there. Sarada all but jumps off before they reach the shore and takes off towards the village with the promise to meet her parents later at the port. She almost makes it to the central market when something grabs her from the back of her dress.

Sarada looks up into her father’s slightly narrowed gaze.

“And where do you think you are going?” His voice is so very dry that she knows he expects a simple, straightforward answer.

So Sarada does not give him one.

“I’m going to see if there are any human experimenting laboratories around here. I decided that I want a fishtail.”

Sasuke blinks back at his daughter and Sarada’s mouth quirks in amusement. Her father huffs and starts to drag her back towards the port and Sarada resigns to her fate.

They walk in silence until she spots her mother’s bright hair and only then does her father let go of her shoulder and says.

“I heard Orochimaru had one around here where he transformed people into fish, so you might be in luck. Better remember to ask him when you get back.”

Sarada’s jaw drops simultaneously with Tamanegi’s ill-timed onigiri meal. The boy’s lower lip juts out so far that Sarada can see it from this distance, but her mind is too preoccupied with her father’s unexpected bout of snark and the newest information she received.

“Are you,” Sarada clenches her jaw, trying to get it working again, “are you _serious_?”

His only answer is a nondescript hum that has Sarada stuck between laughing and being seriously concerned. As it is, she doesn’t decide on an answer in time.

They get there just as her mother fishes out another onigiri and offers it to Tamanegi with an indulgent smile. Then her face breaks into an amused expression and her eyebrows wiggle as she asks with outmost consideration.

“ _Oh_ , Sarada- _chan_!” Sarada glares at her mother. “You’re back from your trip already! How was it?”

It’s Sarada’s turn to pout and she struggles to not punch Tamanegi, who snickers behind his snack.

“Unfortunately, they did not have genetically modified fishtails for sale.”

This is just incredible. Her father is _teasing_ and her mother just stands there with a patient grin, nodding gravelly as if this is indeed a very sad matter.

“That’s too bad, Sara-chan. Maybe next time, no?”

Oh, they are making fun of her alright. Sarada’s never felt so powerless, but her parents’ impeccable collaboration seems to extend to other matters besides missions and fighting.

_And she hates it_.

“I’m seriously going to Orochimaru’s place for summer break!” Her hiss is met with twin indulgent looks, though her father seems _slightly interested_.

_Seriously?!_

“I am not joking!”

“Of course, honey! I’m sure you and Mitsuki-kun will have a lot of fun there.”

Her father snorts, as if the very notion is laughable and takes the lead, guiding them down the docks to a large ship painted white and green. Her mother on the other hand, can’t resist one last jab at her person.

“And now maybe you will see papa more, you know?”

“Ugh, _mama_!” Sarada looks towards the fiery sky imploringly.

Tamanegi glances at her mother in confusion.

“Does Sasuke-san visit Orochimaru so often?” The boy knows about Orochimaru – or actually more accurately, he is aware of him and the relationship he had with the original Shin.

Her father turns his head towards them, shooting a small glare in her mother’s direction, though he never once breaks his stride.

“Stop spreading nonsense, Sakura.”

Her mother’s only answer is to giggle behind her hand. Sarada rolls her eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> things are heating up


	6. Day 11

* * *

**_Sarada's tip:_ ** _Strategically plan travel times and make sure you have ways to distract the kids from getting bored._

_But if you don't - you can adopt some pets on the way to entertain them._

* * *

“How long?” Sarada’s voice is infinitely small as she looks up to the gruff, unshaved man who is actually the captain of the ship hired to bring them to the western shores of the Land of Wind.

“Normally, seven days. Five is there’s no storms.” The man’s answer is matter of fact and honestly a tad uncaring as he continues knotting a very long piece of rope left over from the undocking process.

Something in Sarada balks at the timeline, and she normally has no problem travelling on water, but her stomach churns at the thought.

Five days, possibly seven with their luck, and it’s just a tad too long for her to count on the fact that things on the continent won’t get worse in the time they continue to float on open water. That, and the fact that she can foresee her mother’s temper erupting sometime from the inaction and her father is still an unknown variable _and_ she cannot imagine staying in close quarters with Tamanegi for _a week._

Her mouth is open in protest, as if the poor civilian man could do anything about spurning this old ship to be faster, but her father’s voice puts a stutter to a string of thoughts unbecoming of a professional shinobi.

“We will get there in four days.” And somewhat, his tone leaves no question that they can’t do that lest they break the laws of nature.

The older man gives them both a puzzled look, obviously uncertain of their sanity. His jaw works as he struggles to formulate a response to that, and Sarada figures that he is probably trying to face the fact that his passengers are crazy.

Sarada turns around and skips over the crowded deck after her father. Their ship is nothing to be impressed with, made for storing goods and animals than furnished with the commodities reserved for transporting people, but it is the best uncle Naruto could find under the circumstances and Sarada accepts that. But that does not mean she isn’t holding a sliver of resentment against him because now she has to share a room with Tamanegi.

Her tumbling thoughts come to an end as she leans on the rusted metal railing next to her father. He faces the sea and the waves hitting the hull as the ship splits the water, but Sarada is turned towards her mother’s form, seated on a makeshift bench made out of crates. Several medical scrolls are open around her and she is reading while grinding something to mush in a mortar.

Sarada glares in Tamanegi’s direction out of personal courtesy and the boy returns the gesture twofold from the other side of her mother. It does not escape Sarada’s notice that he is holding an open scroll and a brush in his hand, obviously in the middle of studying the various medical information etched into the scrolls.

“What’s all this, mama?” She crouches down to be at eye level with her mother. Sarada smells something sweet and something refreshing like mint.

Sakura hums as she continues grinding the plants in the mortar to dust, but her gaze meets Sarada’s and she smiles.

“I’m making a few supplies for our mission. This one is a cream, but it’s very delicate.”

“Hmm,” Sarada says nothing, the sound a startling rendition of her father’s more frequent non-answers, but it doesn’t stop her from adding sharply, “and I see you enlisted Tamanegi to help you.”

The string of surprises continues when said boy draws himself behind her mother and sticks out his tongue at her snidely. Sakura either doesn’t catch it or elects to ignore it. Instead she raises a questioning eyebrow at her daughter.

“Well you were too busy sulking around with your father, so I had to find someone else to help me.”

Sasuke hardly seems bothered by the words, though he does turn to them. He shares a rather significant look with her mother, but Sarada has no clue what goes on in these silent conversations they keep having. She supposes that it’s a pretty convenient skill to have when you want to keep people in the dark.

At the end of it, her father sighs and looks to the half moon up in the night sky.

Sarada’s never been more curious.

* * *

DAY 12

The next morning, the sun barely strikes midway through the sky and Sarada has never been more bored in her life. She’s already counted every crate dotting the deck, she helped mama make breakfast and she watched the rolling sea overboard until her eyesight blurred.

She turns her head to the side, just to catch her father’s form, seated on the dirty deck. Weapons are strewn around him again, even if they haven’t used any, and he is in the dull process of re-sharpening his sword. Likewise, her mother is preoccupied with the medical scroll she has unfurled around her.

They both work at a sedate pace, in a companionable silence that stretches and _stretches_.

Sarada huffs and traverses the deck, making sure that her footsteps are loud and clear.

She walks up to Tamanegi, but the boy dutifully ignores her in favour of reading the scroll draped over his lap.

Sarada scowls.

They all behave like they are entirely preoccupied, but she knows that they aren’t. What’s worse – Sarada wants to do something, but she has no desire for anything that includes sitting still. Lead gathers in her stomach, hot and heavy at the thought of doing absolutely _nothing_ for the next four to six days.

“Sarada.”

She startles at the sound of her name and follows the sound back to her father. The weapons are already gathered in the pouch and his sword is placed behind her mother, rested against a crate.

She raises an eyebrow when he only continues to stay there and watch her.

“Yes, papa?”

Sasuke watches his daughter for another two heartbeats before he promptly starts walking toward the railing. Sarada joins him, curious why he’s behaving so strangely.

“Show me your katon.” Sarada blinks as her father casually leans against the rusted metal. “I heard you mastered it.”

Unknowingly, Sarada’s mouth twitches into a proud smirk. She puffs her chest out and rests her hands on her hips when she answers.

“Of course.”

Her hands flow through the hand seals and a great ball of fire is discharged over the glittering surface of the ocean.

Her father offers a satisfied nod and Sarada’s pride doubles at the small smile over his lips. But then his gaze shifts somewhere beyond her shoulder and he says.

“You saw how it’s done. Give it a try.”

Sarada turns to Tamanegi in shock. The last thing she imagined was her father setting this up as a training spree for the boy, but there is a sliver of satisfaction that burns at the back of her throat when Tamanegi barely manages to make a fireball big enough to be considered a ball.

Sasuke releases a noncommittal hum, as if deep in thought. Tamanegi’s shoulders slump.

“Continue to practice. It was a good first try.”

“Yes, Sasuke-san.”

Which leaves Sarada watching her father expectantly for the next challenge. Irritatingly, her father is set on talking for the moment.

“I heard that you visited Ryūchi Cave.”

Sarada cannot understand what exactly he’s getting at.

“That was like a million years ago, papa!” She crosses her arms over her chest, a little defensively. “We needed to find Mitsuki and Boruto ended up making a contract with that crazy snake Garaga.”

“Aa. I also heard that Aoda saved you all from dying.” It might be her imagination then, but as the powerful wind tousles their hair, her father’s eyes shine with mirth. “And that you did not listen to him and stay put.”

A scowl climbs on her face. So now he’s picking out her flaws, as if they are facts he read in a scroll. Right in front of her, with amazing clinical detachment, that for a strenuous moment, Sarada’s mind flashes to a whispered conversation she overheard a few days ago.

Her scowl deepens, which seems to take her father aback for a moment.

“So? We were trying to save Mitsuki!”

“Yes, Aoda did say so as well.” He is entirely too casual about this. It rattles Sarada the wrong way.

“Papa, if you are trying to scold me for that, it’s two years too late-“

“Actually, I was trying to ask if you want to sign a contract for a summoning.”

This stops Sarada right in the middle of her tirade and her eyes go wide behind her glasses because she certainly did not expect this. Her father seems slightly uncomfortable under her surprised stare, but she cannot do much about the fact that her brain is currently unable to string a few words together for an answer.

“Aoda has grown surprisingly attached to you.” He rolls his eyes then, though not with any ill intention. More like with unbridled tolerance. “He’s always asking after you. More than usual.”

The halting words that come out of her father’s mouth seem unbelievable at first, but this also looks like all the other times he’s had to explain in a lot of detail a situation to her. The first time around ended up in a pretty embarrassing fight that abruptly ended after her mother gently reminded him that Sarada is not a mind reader and that, just like him, she needs to be offered a good reason to do something.

“So,” Sarada clears her throat surreptitiously, “you want me to make a contract with Aoda?”

“No,” something in her deflates, “I’m not making you do anything. I simply asked because having a summon animal is a lot of help most of the time. And you don’t necessarily have to sign a contract with Aoda. His kids seem trustworthy too.”

Sarada’s mind stutters to an abrupt stop.

“Aoda-san,” she begins, not quite trusting herself to finish that question, but overcome with a mighty need _to know_ , “has kids?”

“Three.” Sasuke looks uncertain why this information is so incredible to her. “But that is only if you decide to do it.”

Sarada swallows as her gaze falls to her feet. This isn’t really fair, she thinks, but then again, she didn’t imagine closing a contract, at least not in the near future. She struggles to remember everything that happened in the Cave, but the memories are a little blurry.

What she does remember is a snake woman dead set on eating them all and then waking up to that strange Snake Hermit and her impossible demands. Boruto told her some of the things that happened in his trials and they certainly weren’t a walk in the park. Not to mention that the cave’s residents aren’t extremely nice, nor are they so willing to help. Aoda is the exception to that rule, but Sarada thinks that it is so because of her father.

Her lips thin, suddenly incredibly undecisive.

Sasuke must see that because he asks, deceptively calm.

“Unless you wish to close a contract with another type of animal.” It is phrased like a question, but to Sarada it feels like an observation. “Maybe with Lady Katsuyu.”

Sarada tries very hard to mask her grimace. Lady Katsuyu is incredibly nice, but Sarada is more battle oriented than support and she is certain that she will not be able to attain the level of control and medical expertise needed to use Lady Katsuyu on a large scale like her mother does.

“You can have more than one contract anyway.”

Sometimes, deep down she wanted to ask her father about his snake summonings, but she never got the courage to go through with it. And then there was never time because he’s rarely home and now he suddenly asks her this when they are on a boat in the middle of the ocean. This is not _fair_ because she was not _prepared_.

“Please tell me you don’t want to sign one with the toads at least.”

“Ugh, papa!” Sarada throws her head back and pinches the bridge of her nose. “I was just thinking about it.” A sigh of exasperation escapes through her lips. “Man, sometimes you’re really annoying!”

A bark of laughter startles Sarada enough to jump a little and she looks back to see her mother doubled over her scrolls, laughing so hard she’s crying.

Sarada looks up to see her father’s eyes closed and a tight expression over his face. They stay like that for a minute, with Tamanegi struggling in the background to make a decently sized fireball.

“Oh darling, that was a good laugh!” Sakura wipes tears from the corner of her eyes and leans back against a crate with a sleazy smirk that sets off alarms in Sarada’s mind. “She really is your daughter, I will tell you that.”

“Hn.”

The non-answer is as evasive as usual, but Sarada senses the waves of embarrassment and _something else_ coming from her father, while her mother is bathed in intense amusement over whatever Sarada just said.

“Anyway honey,” this one is Sarada’s nickname, “you can decide whenever, but your father thought that having a summoning contract might be beneficial in this mission. You can have more than one, but most people settle on just one type of animal they want to use and concentrate on strengthening their collaboration with them. And we know that you are more suited to close battle than support, so Aoda-san was the better choice. But it’s your decision, Sarada.”

Sarada purses her lips and thinks hard, though it’s not that complicated really. Actually, she should be jumping at the chance, but something keeps her back and uncertain.

“Don’t I need to pass the trials of the Cave first?”

Her father lifts an eyebrow. “In your case, not really. There is already a snake who wants to sign a contract with you. Most need to pass those trials if they wish to speak with the White Snake hermit or they are searching for a snake summon to close a contract with.”

It actually makes a lot of sense, when she thinks about it.

“You don’t need to give me an answer now. I proposed this because I thought it would be beneficial to you.”

Or rather, he is really worried and wants to give his daughter a trusty companion to watch her back. Sarada tampers her grin with a serious nod.

“It’s fine, papa. I was just surprised. It’ll be great if I can make a contract!”

She catches her father’s gaze soften marginally before Sarada is caught in her mother’s tight embrace.

“My baby is making her first contract!”

“First? How many contracts did _you_ do, mama?”

Her mother tugs at a lock of Sarada’s hair with a pout. “Let me have my moment!” Then her gaze turns expectantly in her father’s direction. “Who is she going to sign the contract with, Sasuke-kun?”

“Ah, I was thinking about Aoda’s daughter-“

“I’m going to stop you right there, dear.” Father and daughter blink at the force behind her mother’s overly large smile. “I don’t think they are a good match.”

Her father wavers, hesitating, but Sarada trusts her mother as well as her father. So she won’t interfere, especially because she knows nothing about Aoda-san’s _three children._

Sarada watches her parents gaze into each other’s eyes again, lost in their own little world and she wants nothing more than to be far away from that spot, but her mother’s strong arms cage her in and she’s left doing nothing but standing there in between them like the biggest idiot in the world.

“A-Ah! Tamanegi!”

Everyone snaps to attention and even Sarada is shocked by her thoughtless escape plan. In reality, all she did was call the name of the only other person on deck.

“How about I show you some tricks for katon?”

She takes advantage of her mother’s surprise and extracts herself without much problem. Sarada skips to the boy’s side, ignoring his questioning gaze and refuses to look back at her parents as she says.

“Call me when you decided!”

Even if it is irritating most of the time, this once Sarada inwardly thanks Tamanegi for his existence.

* * *

It’s after lunch when Sarada trails after her father to the stern again. Tamanegi is with them this time, but her mother retreated to her room to take a nap.

“The hand seals for the summoning jutsu are boar, dog, bird, monkey, ram.” Sasuke explains patiently. “I don’t do them because I can.”

Sarada fights very hard against slapping her palm over her forehead. Tamanegi remains motionless and equally emotionless in the face of her father’s bad humour. Maybe he can’t detect it because he doesn’t imagine the fearsome Uchiha Sasuke ever trying to crack a joke.

Her father bites his thumb, but instead of slamming his palm down on the deck like, say, a normal person would, he jumps ship and slams it on the unsteady surface of the ocean.

Sarada’s jaw falls open as a brown striped snake appears on the surface. Its golden eyes dart around, but it bows its head when it spots her father drop down from its head to the deck.

“Mozomo, you know what to do.”

The snake seems to nod. It first spits out and deposits a thick scroll on the wooden floor of the deck before it darts into the water and disappears. Sarada opens her mouth to ask, but right then the ship shakes and creaks, as if two seconds away from falling apart. It settles just as the captain comes running out of the main cabin.

“What’s going on?!”

Her father shrugs mercilessly. “I called for help. We have three days to get there.”

The captain raises a finger with the clear intent to protest, but the ship starts moving at a faster pace.

Sarada blinks against the sudden spray of water from the higher waves. The wind bites uncomfortably at her cheeks, but her attention is drawn away from these little changes when her father takes her by the shoulder and directs her to the middle of the deck.

“Now it’s your turn.”

“That was not Aoda-san.” Sarada says instead of anything else.

“Yes, I asked Aoda to send someone able to guide this ship along faster.” Sasuke watches her and Sarada bites her cheek, suddenly nervous.

“Is Sarada going to try summoning snakes now?” Tamanegi’s tone is interested, if slightly envious. Sarada’s back straightens, as if electrocuted by the power of his gaze and she grits her teeth.

Her fist rests against her open palm as she declares.

“Let’s do this!”

Her father nods and unfurls the large scroll. It rolls away to reveal countless names signed in blood. Sarada squints at the curly symbols dotting the borders.

“This is the scroll that belongs to Aoda’s clan.”

“The snakes have clans?”

“Something like that yes.”

Sarada kneels next to her father, jittery to get this over with. She reads through the list of names visible and immediately spots her father’s, not far back on the timeline.

“You need to sign your name in blood and a snake under Aoda’s care will come to your aid. Sarada,” she looks up at her father’s somber expression, “I talked with Aoda after I discussed it with your mother. His daughter,” he shakes his head with a grimace, “is not that well-tempered. I thought you could handle her, but Aoda agrees with your mother. So, he’s given your summoning contract to his sons. They are twins,” he explains when Sarada frowns because she thought that she will only handle _one_ snake, “so if you apply a little bit more chakra, you will be able to summon both of them at the same time.”

She nods because what else is she supposed to do?

There is a myriad of questions flying through her mind, and half of them have to do with the fact that Aoda-san is the head of a clan of snakes, but not all of them are his family.

Or something.

It is very, _incredibly_ confusing, but she doubts that her father will answer anything right at this moment.

Closing the contracting is no grandiose thing. Sarada bites her thumb hard enough to draw blood, signs her name tidily and offers her fingerprints. The blood barely had enough time to dry before her father rolls is back and directs an expectant look in her direction.

With a deep steadying breath, she follows her memory for the hand seals and slams her palm on the ground.

“Kuchiyose no jutsu!”

It is a strange thing to feel her chakra rapidly draining from her and into the seal on the ground. She puts in as much as she dares and the results pops to life in a cloud of smoke in front of them.

The snakes she summoned aren’t as big as Aoda-san is and their eyes are yellow, but they have the same coloring and the same features.

“Sasuke-sama, Sarada-sama.”

Definitely Aoda-san’s child.

“Yo, Sarada-chan! Father didn’t say you are this pretty.”

Definitely the wrong second snake.

His well-mannered brother hits him over the head with his tail.

“Be respectful!”

“I-It’s nice to meet you.” Sarada raises a hand, overwhelmed by their clashing personalities.

“My name is Anda. And this is my brother Inda. It is an honour to meet you.”

“Yeah!” Inda agrees excitedly, tail wiggling.

He seems to be an unbridled bundle of energy, waiting to spring into attack. It reminds Sarada of a dog, but bigger and infinitely deadlier.

“The old man told us a lot about you. What’s up, Sasuke-san?”

“Don’t be so familiar!” Anda chastises again, but her father does not seem to mind.

“Anda, Inda,” both snakes snap to attention and even Sarada feels the urge to join them, “I am counting on you to keep Sarada out of trouble.”

“Of course, sir.” Anda answers graciously and dips into a shallow bow.

“Sure thing, Sasuke-san!”

“So how much time can they stay here after I summon them?”

Her father opens his mouth to answer when the door to the cabins slams open and her mother strides through. She seems a little bit dishevelled, like she just woke up, but her eyes burn with frustration and Sarada takes a step back and tries to hide behind her father.

Tamanegi inches away as well, out of the line of fire, since mama is set on walking in their direction.

“What is going on here!? First the ship rocks, then it shakes again! Sasuke what are you making them do-“

Sakura takes in the two big snakes and offers a surprised “Oh.”

“ _Sakura-sama_!”

Her name is echoed by Anda and Inda, both of whom Sarada sees suddenly sweating, which she didn’t think would be possible in a snake.

“Hello you two.” Sakura says breezely as she walks up to papa, hands on her hips. “Mou, Sasuke-kun! I can’t believe you didn’t call me to see our daughter do her first summoning!”

She’s pouting but Sasuke affects a tranquil air around him when he answers. “I thought you were resting.”

“Not with you guys trying to destroy the ship!” The pout deepens. “And I had to explain to the captain why there are two large snakes suddenly on his ship.”

Sarada’s mouth quirks into a smile that falls as soon as her mother’s eyes land on Tamanegi. The boy has inched closer to Sarada’s summons, studying their glistening scales under the afternoon sun.

“Are you giving Tamanegi a contract, too?”

Said boy jumps and Sarada is slightly guilty to hear her father destroy his hopes.

“No. First he needs to master the katon. We will see after that.”

She doesn’t know what takes over her then. Maybe it’s the rush of closing the contract and having a summon animal, or maybe it’s because there is a small part of her that understands Tamanegi’s struggle to reach new heights. Sarada offers a pat in turn to Anda and Inda before she directs her gaze and meets Tamanegi’s.

“Well then, I guess I can practice along with him.” She finds her father’s eyes, sees the amused underlayer behind that black and purple and grins. “Maybe learn the phoenix technique!”

She’s never seen Tamanegi so surprised.

* * *

DAY 13 & 14

The rest of the journey passes much in the same way as Sarada has expected. Her crumbling boredom from the first day has evaporated to a spotty memory and instead of relaxing, she found herself subjected to Tamanegi’s nagging on top of her father’s quiet approval.

She manages to hit pretty close to the perfect form of _katon: phoenix sage fire technique_ after two days, but Sarada hardly has time to enjoy that particular victory because Tamanegi has already mastered great fireball jutsu and is moving onto phoenix as well, which means Sarada needs to move onto the next move if she wants to stay on top of the other boy.

Under her father’s tutelage, she extends her katon arsenal to three variations on fireball and then switches to raiton because Sarada wants to subtly suggest to her father that she wants to learn the Chidori. But she is too proud to insist, especially because Tamanegi is right there, absorbing _everything_ in his wake like a sponge and the last thing Sarada wishes is to share her father’s original techniques with him. A thought after which she feels a tad guilty, but Sarada is a little territorial when it comes to her parents, more so because her father is so often absent. She knows for a fact that Tamanegi is quietly seething about that part, even if he barely shows it nowadays.

So Sasuke, more often than not, lets them spar and practice shuriken jutsu on each other to release some of that animosity, that must be a blaring red in his eyes. Her mother on the other hand, tuts about their ongoing silent and tense behaviour around each other, but she does not pry.

Sakura is oftentimes caught up in her medical scrolls, but lately she’s been making something that oozes a purple steam that has Sarada’s stomach roiling at the thought that she might have to drink it in the near future.

And during all of this, the great water snake Mozomo continues to guide their ship over the restless ocean surface.

* * *

DAY 15

“That is our destination.”

Sarada squints at the empty beach on the horizon. There is nothing at all to even hint at a port.

The western shores of the Land of Wind are carved with thin strips of beaches and feeble coppices that abruptly end when they hit the tall rock cliffs where the continent cuts off into the sea.

Sarada has to crane her neck pretty far out to catch a glimpse of the towering walls of crumbling red stone. She can see nothing up there, but her father declares their surroundings clear.

He directs the captain to approach the shore as much as he dares, but the banks of sand are big in this area and they end up having to walk the rest of the way to land.

“We will use chakra to climb the wall.”

“Why can’t we ask Garuda-san to take us up?” Sarada asks curiously. It would certainly help them conserve their energy.

“It’s easier to get spotted on such a big summon. We need to scout the top of the cliff carefully in case there are enemies.” Her father explains as he places one foot on the wall.

“Not so much enemies as there might possibly be tribesmen and nomadic warriors. Gaara insisted to be careful when we cross the Strait.” Mama adds, a strange tension in her tone.

A small flicker of worry intrudes upon Sarada then, because she does not necessarily like the prospect of losing time on useless fights. She is just about to ask her father why they won’t ask Garuda to fly them all the way across the whole Strait when Sasuke crouches down near the upper edge of the wall.

They all duck and stand as close to the red stone as possible. Sarada watches her father frown as he concentrates to sense whether there are any discernible chakra spots on the plateau ahead. When he seems satisfied, he angles his head and peeks over the edge with his rinnegan.

Sarada clenches her fists as she waits behind her mother, impatient and worried. Her father gives the signal then and they all jump over the top and start running.

“Eyes open, Sarada, Tamanegi. Use your sharingan to check once in a while, but don’t overdo it.”

Sarada nods and activates her bloodline limit, taking in the tall dunes of sand forming the empty desert on their right side and the patch of gravel they are forced to use as they run along the cliff. She grits her teeth as she concentrates on not making any sounds, though the environment isn’t helpful at all.

Keeping her gaze trained ahead for the rest of the time, Sarada is slow to register when they break into the Strait. It looks like any other part of the desert – an empty nothingness with no places to hide in. But the land on the other side of the narrow canal is overflowing with vegetation and birds. Crawling plants hide in the shadow and the coolness of the strait’s walls, and the short trees are green with thick branches and small, numerous leaves.

It is disorienting, seeing parts that belong to such different worlds exist so close together.

“Sasuke-kun,” her mother’s voice comes from the back, “we should move faster. We’ve only made about one out of the five kilometres we need to pass and the sun is going down.”

Mama doesn’t have to mention that running in the dark, with that forest filled with countless hiding places to their left is a bad idea.

In response, her father’s strides increase and Sarada steels herself and tries to keep up.

In front of her, Tamanegi seems unaffected by the merciless pace and yet she can distinguish the strain of his shoulders with her sharingan. At least, she is not alone in her suffering.

They don’t stop until they’ve cleared the strait and emerge onto the beaten shores of the sea shouldered by four countries. The sun has just slipped behind the line of the horizon when they stop next to a large rock formation near the edges of the beach. The dark waters glint gold under the moonlight and Sarada closes her eyes against the smell of saltwater and the sound of waves crashing against the shore.

Sarada is huddled up in her makeshift bed on the still warm sand, sheltered by the slicing winds by the rough boulder. Her father is already napping, sitting between Sarada and Tamanegi and leaning against the stone while her mother keeps watch.

Sarada blearily cracks an eye open and spots Tamanegi slipping under his own cover until he disappears behind her father’s form.

“Sarada,” a soft hand brushes her cheek. Her eyes try to trail over to her mother’s face and Sarada barely hears the rest of her words before she falls asleep, “rest up.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> did i just shamelessly give sarada two summoning snakes? yes, yes i did  
> will i use every occassion to bring aoda and my oc snakes into the picture? hah, of course


	7. Day 16

* * *

**_Sarada's tip:_ ** _Prepare yourself for the different civilizations you will encounter along your journey and also for the impending doom of all you know and trust._

_But if you don't - it's best to blame others for that and not yourself._

* * *

The sun beats down on her back mercilessly as Sarada trails after her mother. Her activated sharingan gives her a precise reading on possible incoming dangers, but for the moment it is useless against the arid weather and the ache of her burning muscles.

A large hawk suddenly takes off into the sky and her steps falter for one moment before her mind catches up.

“I sent a scout ahead.” Her father declares and Sarada sees her mother silently nod.

They are just breaking through the border with the land of Bears and, as its name implies, there will be a great many bears waiting for one of them to slip on tree branches. Or possibly, as papa promptly hurried to shatter her world and turn it into a nightmare, there might be bears _waiting_ for them on tree branches, ready to take a bite.

_There are also giant bears that don’t need to climb trees, but they are the easiest to spot._

Sarada sighs in defeat, hoping that at least the land of Honey will be less exciting.

Their supposed destination is Hoshigakure, a minor ninja village in the grand scheme of the world, but the biggest one in this land. There they are supposed to be meeting with an ANBU black ops operations unit that has been tasked to keep an eye on their enemies’ movements.

By her father’s estimations – and if they are not eaten by a bear on the way there – they should arrive in Hoshigakure by nightfall. 

The border between the Land of Bears and the land of Wind is a nondescript plateau because it hardly marks a change from one climate to the other. Sarada passes the imaginary line still working her feet through sand, but the scenery doesn’t stay that way for long.

Small shrubs give into thin trees, trying their best to live and then to large, thick barked arbours that shoot into the sky, with branches large enough for three people to land on.

But before they get to the neater, more familiar part of the dense forest, the first bear makes its appearance from behind a grey rock surrounded by plant life. The animal literally drops on them after it jumps from top of the boulder and yet Sarada can only be surprised by the fact that the animal managed to get a jump on them in the first place.

She dodges in time and rolls to a stop a few meters away, gaze flying to the rest of her group. Her father is already advancing towards the growling animal, while her mother tries to sneak behind it, though it proves a hard strategy to accomplish when its sharp claws fly in random directions. Tamanegi’s mangekyou is spinning wildly and Sarada realizes that he is trying to trap the bear in a genjutsu, but that is also a hard thing to do when it won’t look directly into his eyes.

Sarada clenches her fists tightly, not above punching the ground to give it a good scare and she wonders why her mother hasn’t done that already when she realizes that if they do that, it will give their position away. Though the bear is doing a good job of that anyways.

As she studies the large animal, Sarada realizes why she never saw it coming. Besides the fact that it waited so quietly and unmoving, like one of those big cat predators, its fur is also an intriguing stony grey with dark green spots that, on a second look, don’t look part of the animal. Which means, she thinks quickly, eyes flying around and stopping on the boulder and the trees with large, thick leaves, the bear must have used the pigment of the leaves to get that color on his fur.

She is strangely impressed by the intelligence of the hunter, but that means that the bears in this land are more dangerous than the type you might meet in the Land of Fire – which are also not specimens to laugh about.

“Sarada!” Sakura ducks from a large paw that tries to take her head off. “Match your father!”

She doesn’t need to be told twice. As her mother shouts for Tamanegi, her palms fill with four shuriken stars that are launched with precision towards her own father’s. They collide with a shrill sound that disorients the bear long enough to have it take a few steps back. It also gives enough time for Sasuke to promptly place seven kunai in a circle around it. Sarada spots the wire thread through the hoops of the weapons as her father lands on the other side.

The bear shockingly sees it as well because it lifts its paw, ready to make its way out of the circle, but her father shoots raiton through the wire and traps the animal inside.

Its growls turn frantic, but quickly die down when a rather large surge leaves it drunkenly tumbling to the ground.

Sarada expels a breath she didn’t know she was holding and turns to find the tension leave her mother’s form as she shakes her head.

“Right, I didn’t think we’d get jumped so fast.”

Sarada winces at the poor wording, but ambles quickly to her side, careful of the sleeping bear not much further away.

“These animals are very intelligent.”

“Yes,” her father’s eyes narrow on the animal at their feet, “a little too intelligent.”

Sakura extracts a large vial filled with a thick brown liquid and uncaps it. As usual, Sarada is her first victim.

“Ew, _mom_!” Sarada scrunches her nose at the pungent smell of plants and the creamy texture that makes it look exactly like, well, _shit_. “What the hell is this?!”

The skin on her upper arms and legs is filled with that thing, as is a little bit of her forehead.

Sarada studies it with unbridled disgust while Tamanegi is subjected to the same treatment.

“This is an unguent to help disguise our smells. We can blend into the forest better and maybe it will discourage bears to attacks us.”

“That’s a good idea.” Her father agrees even though his face crumbles into the same disgust Sarada still feels.

Her mother giggles and finishes applying the cream on herself before they start running again. They make it into the deep forest without any further incident and, shockingly, her mother’s cream works because there are attacked only two times more.

One time by a dark brown bear hanging expertly onto a branch, giving Sarada possibly the biggest scare of her life when it jumps up just as she lands on it. The other time is when they take a break and her mother has to _gently_ kick the animal that looms over her so it would turn tail and flee.

Whatever the case is with the large amount of bears in this country, it also sports one of the most amazing scenery Sarada’s ever seen. The forest seems to go on and on forever and the smells of the forest are so amplified that they are bordering on bothersome, yet she can’t exactly complain.

Their group is almost on top of Hoshikagure’s outer suburbs when the forest parts and brings them right in the path of a large bear, as tall as some of the trees. It is angrily swiping with its paws at the arbours surrounding it, but Sarada doesn’t have time to figure out why it’s behaving like that before her father drags her to the forest floor and they cut a wide curve around it.

Which brings them right to one of the gates of the village, filled with a rather large crowd of people for a big bear to be hanging out just on the outskirts of.

Her mother seems to be on the same page because she asks the guard checking their documents at the entrance. “There is a giant bear not far away from here.”

“Ah, yes, we know about it.” The guard shrugs noncommittally and Sarada is suddenly wary of spending the night in a village that could be attacked by bears at any time. But the other option is to sleep out in the forest and also be attacked by bears at any time, so Sarada will take option with the hot shower and a comfortable bed.

A shinobi guard guides them to an old inn not far from the gate. The low building squats between a butchery and a jewelry shop, with small windows glinting out of the dark wooden building.

Sarada raises an eyebrow, but she is tentatively awed by the traditional feel of the place. The interior is dim and tastefully modelled after the customary style of the country. They are assigned two rooms, which brings Sarada’s world quickly clashing down from the height of her thoughts and she scowls. Figures that she’ll be stranded with Tamanegi for the rest of this mission.

With a mighty and grudging effort, Sarada accepts this fact and promises herself that she will behave professionally and not disappoint her parents or make them embarrassed even as she frustration colors her thoughts on this matter.

“We’ll come get you tomorrow morning, alright?” Sakura is already one foot inside her own room when she says this.

But Sarada turns to her with a frown.

“What about…?” She trails off, knowing that it’s better not to say it out loud.

Her mother’s smile is tighter than is normal and she shakes her head. “We will handle it. You guys take the opportunity and sleep as much as you can. It’s going to get a lot more difficult from tomorrow on.”

Sarada doesn’t like the sound of that and neither is she excited to be left behind again.

With a sharp nod she closes the door to her room and turns around to survey the simple accommodations. The floor is covered in tatami mats and there is only a simple closet where the futons are held and a door to a small bathroom.

“Such a scary face you got on.” Tamanegi observes, casually propped up on the sill and half dangling out of the window. Sarada rolls her eyes at the ridiculous boy. “What happened?” He asks when she offers no explanation.

“They are going to the meeting without us.” Sarada says with a hint of bitterness as she starts to take off her headband and arm covers.

“Hm,” Tamanegi grunts and looks out to the dark sky, “and why is that so tragic?”

This prompts Sarada to raise an eyebrow in his direction, even though he doesn’t see it. “Don’t _you_ want to know what they found out?”

“They will tell us tomorrow morning anyway.”

Sarada snorts halfway through his sentence. It’s Tamanegi’s turn to frown. “What?”

“No way they are going to do that.” Sarada walks towards the window as she speaks. “Sure, they are going to tell us about the mission, but it’s going to be an abbreviated version with nothing but facts.” She catches Tamanegi’s gaze and he looks back unflinchingly. “And I, for one, want to know _everything_.”

“This is a breach of orders.”

“What? Wanting to be equally informed?” Sarada feels her blood boil and turns her nose up, though her eyes are set on the lights of the village. “Then they shouldn’t have taken me along. Are you coming with?”

Tamanegi remains motionless for long enough to signal Sarada that the answer is a no, so she turns around and starts preparing to head out again. She forgoes her headband, but she adds a small henge over her features, so she won’t be as discernible at first sight.

She’s about to open the door when she hears Tamanegi move and her arm is raised, poised with a sharpened kunai in his direction. But he is not going to stop her, as Sarada assumed, and is instead watching her with slight amusement at her jumpy attitude.

“I think that I will accompany you on your walk.”

Sarada scoffs and trudges out the door, resolute not to wait for him if he falls behind.

* * *

It proves laughably easy to trail after her parents through the sleepy village. Sarada’s only complaint comes from the ache in her feet and the pounding headache behind her eyes, reminding her that the day hasn’t been easy nor relaxing. And she is kind of pushing it by staying until the ungodly hour of one in the morning to nose in on her parents’ top secret mission.

The venue for this event is a rundown shop that sells strange ingredients for medicinal purposes and bear skins. It sits quietly at the end of a nondescript alley filled with shadows and trashcans that Sarada and Tamanegi use to duck behind as they crawl closer and closer to the one level wooden building.

There is only one lit window in the whole establishment, and it comes from the right side of the building. Sarada leans against a water pipe that drips a steady stream of water on her toes and Tamanegi props himself into a crouch, directly under the window.

“I only see one covert entrance point and it is up there.” The boy lifts up a finger and Sarada lifts her gaze to the place in question. It is a small hole in the rundown roof, too small for the both of them hanging side by side, but dark enough that it seems deep to hold them both if they climb in one by one.

With a grunt, she heaves herself against the wall and channels chakra into her soles to climb quickly. Her fingers skim the mouldy surface and she grips the edge and heaves herself inside.

“I cast a genjutsu to keep our chakra masked. At worst they will think we are a cat.” Tamanegi appears behind her like a real-life shadow.

Sarada nods tersely and shimmies in the tight space until she finds a small hole in the planks beneath them and she peeks at the room beyond. It’s a small space filled by a round table and thick bear skins over the walls. Several maps are strewn over the table and there are already six people gathered inside the room – her parents and four ANBU with different animal masks and signs, designing them to three of the five nations: Fire, Wind and Earth and one ANBU from the Hidden Rain.

“This is everything we have managed to gather.” A Suna ANBU says and points to something on one of the maps. Sarada can’t see exactly what it represents, but she guesses that they must be discussing possible hiding spots for the terrorists they are searching for. “North-West of Iwa, there is an unclaimed land bordering the ocean. We found evidence that the terrorist organization’s roots might have spawned from one of the smaller agricultural centers there. They entered illegally in the Land of Mountain Streams, but there was only marginal effort to search and exile them.”

“Obviously the authorities didn’t believe that they will become such a problem.” The ANBU from Konoha comments, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Or they didn’t have the necessary manpower to cast them out.” Her father says evenly. “Did you find out how they managed to poison all that water? I doubt that there was an agent in every city.”

“Not necessarily.” The ANBU from Rain and Iwa exchange an unseen glance between them before the one from Iwa continues. “It’s true that it can take months, but the majority of the rivers flowing from these mountains in the twin lands of Mountains and Mountain Streams effuse in other rivers. And after millions of years, most have direct flow towards the ocean. In other words, they traverse a whole lot of different countries.”

“Do you mean to say,” her mother begins in a tremulous voice, eyes fixed on the discoloured map, “that these people have deliberately poured poison at the source of these rivers with the aim to indiscriminately harm as many people as possible?”

“This means that they don’t necessary have a set target.” The Konoha ANBU comments rather dryly. “Their aim is to kill everyone in their path.”

“How much poison would it take, do you think?” Her father looks to her mother who purses her lips in thought.

“Judging by the symptoms people first developed and the rate it’s progressing, I believe that small quantities over a larger time span. The only problem is that plants and animals are also affected, so people with a larger water intake, those who fished in those rivers and ate the plants growing near their banks are more predisposed to suffer first. But even so, their strategy is an exact science and they executed it perfectly. Which brings me to believe that they know exactly what they are doing and how.”

“That makes sense, but it also doesn’t.” Sarada’s eyebrows jump at the statement. “How did they get to Suna then? And it’s been the second country to experience such cases.”

“Underground rivers.” Her mother answers simply. “And it was the second country that did _report_ the appearance of these cases.” She directs a sharp-eyed glare to the Iwa and Rain ANBU.

“Or they sent someone there especially for that reason.” The men in question expertly gloss over the accusations. “The same thing they probably did in Kiri.”

“Listen closely,” the Suna ANBU begins and taps the map pointedly, “there are several routes that you can take, but most of them are being surveilled. The land of Forests is filled with possible enemy platoons.”

“It’s hard to believe that they are so organized.” Her father comments languidly.

“I can confirm matters.” The ANBU from Iwa says. “During our collaboration with Ishi we managed to infiltrate as far as the land of Vegetables. The forces from Suna took the same route you are walking now and only two of them made it to the land of Vegetables alive. At least that is what the two we encountered reported.”

“It might be possible that they hired mercenaries to do the job.” The Rain ANBU observes, not as concerned as he should generally be.

“Alright, then we will-“

This is as far as Sarada hears of the discussion because all of a sudden Tamanegi’s dark form vanishes from her side. Her eyes widen before she has truly managed to turn her head all the way around, but then something grabs her from behind and the world tilts for three long heartbeats before it rights itself again. All of Sarada’s muscles are rigid with tension, and her heart beats a wild rhythm inside her chest as she desperately searches for the person who just attacked them.

She only finds the Leaf ANBU in the shadows of the alleyway. His cat mask shields his face well but Sarada spots the dark hair, dripping over the edges of the mask, stark against the red slashed lines.

“Nosy children are supposed to be in bed at this hour.” His voice is somewhat muffled, but sounds incredibly level, if amused.

Sarada glares and she gripes with animosity. “Sorry, my parents told me not to talk to strangers.” 

Next to her Tamanegi shifts, body curving as if an attack is imminent, and Sarada watches the relaxed posture of the man with something akin to trepidation. She wonders if he will take them inside and proudly present them to the gathered audience.

Inwardly, she staves off a wince, uncertain what her mother will do when she finds out about their midnight spying session.

“What about a familiar face then?” And without much preamble, the man removes his mask and leaves behind uncle Sai.

Sarada’s eyes widen, relief and fear mingling inside her chest.

“Uncle Sai!”

Tamanegi relaxes marginally, though he is still glaring at the man who so unceremoniously dragged them out of the building.

Uncle Sai offers one of his strange, straight smiles, though Sarada spots the warmth gathered behind it. His features are somewhat haggard in the late hour and his white skin gives him the eerie visage of a ghost under the pale moonlight.

“You are the ANBU lord Seventh sent.” Sarada expels the words in a breath that leaves her deflated, the adrenaline pumping through her veins leaving her as if in a rush.

“Yes.” Uncle Sai confirms casually. “The small animals I sent to scour the building alerted me that they found two kids in the attic and I decided to investigate since I didn’t have much to say in the first place.”

Sarada’s lips twitch with amusement. Her uncle Sai is incredibly strange and full of candour most of the time, a fact which sometimes makes her mother – and even auntie Ino – angry and frustrated, but Sarada likes this about him. Inojin is somewhat the same, but uncle Sai always had an air of social awkwardness about him that makes it easier to communicate with.

“Sorry,” it must be said, but she doesn’t mean it, “I figured that mama and papa wouldn’t tell us everything and I really needed to know what’s going on.”

Uncle Sai’s thin lips curve into a more honest smile. “I’m surprised that your parents aren’t expecting that. Or maybe they are…” The fact that he trails off uncertainly twists Sarada’s stomach into knots.

“How is everything back in Konoha?” Tamanegi surprises them both when he speaks, quiet as a whisper but underlined with worry.

Sai studies him for a long moment.

“Stable, at the moment. Naruto, Kakashi-sensei and even Lady Tsunade are coordinating the efforts, along with everyone else. Consumption of water has been reduced to a minimum, as is everything else that involves using it. The research and development teams are working on suitable filters, but it will take a while. But I have confidence in Tsunade-sama and the team stationed in Kiri that they will finish an antidote in time.”

“Everything that involves water – you mean _everything_!” Sarada cannot imagine how a large city like Konoha could just _stop,_ but it apparently happened because uncle Sai rarely jokes about such serious matters. “How much longer until the antidote is complete?”

Uncle Sai tilts his head from side to side, and the motion sets a heavy stone loose in Sarada’s chest.

“Depends.” The man says evasively. “But every day they are steadily closer to it.”

“Any victims?” Tamanegi’s voice is terse.

“Unfortunately,” something dark glints in uncle Sai’s gaze, “and the number is steadily rising. That’s why we came here to meet up with you. My team is coordinating with three others to surround them from the north and keep only one path open for you.”

“The one we’re following now.” Sarada whispers with dawning comprehension.

Sai nods. “Yes. Past scouting missions helped us cut as close as possible to their possible hideout without rising any alarms and now we’re going all in.”

This means that it will be quite a large scale battle in the days to come, and Sarada wonders if her parents were aware of that before they argued so ardently for Sarada and Tamanegi to join them. She is half afraid that they are going to make them stay behind, but she doubts it. Her father, at least, won’t go back on his word, especially after the argument he had with uncle Naruto and uncle Kakashi about it. His pride would win in the end and her mother, despite being worried, trusts in her father’s decisions.

And, in spite of what she overheard him say back in Suna, Sarada knows that he trusts her and is confident in her abilities. Otherwise he’d have said something to her a very long time ago. Her father is never one to keep quiet if something is bothering him and he thinks that he can fix it.

Uncle Sai’s eyes flit to the cracked window and Sarada understands that this is as much information as she’s going to get out of this night. Which is why she smiles, tired and feeling dead on her feet, but still sincere because her uncle is very good at deciphering people’s real emotions behind whatever façade they put up.

“Thanks for not telling on us.” She clamps a hand on Tamanegi’s forearm, much to the boy’s instant irritation. “We’ll get out of here.”

Sai nods and Sarada sprints with the other Uchiha boy into the night.

“He is most certainly going to tell on us.” Tamanegi’s words drag into a frustrating drawn-out sentence and Sarada rolls her eyes, thankful that the dark night lets her do so in peace. “Things are looking pretty bad and they’ve only assigned your parents and the two of us on it.”

As if she needed a reminder.

“Didn’t you hear?” Sarada asks instead with her usual bite. Something in her stomach curls unpleasantly. “They are sending ANBU squads from all over to surround them.”

A soft snort rises over the sound of their crunching footsteps.

“The notion gives me an incredible amount of relief.” His sarcasm is curbed by Sarada’s hand tightening its grip to a painful intensity, but Tamanegi is nothing if not a masochist. “Sure, they are sending two of the three most recent legendary shinobi to come out of Konoha, but they are also sending two fourteen year old kids into what might become an active warzone. My apologies if lord Seventh’s strategy does not inspire into me the same steadfast belief it does in you.”

Sarada skitters to a stop somewhere between a hat shop and a rundown apartment building. The street is wide but deserted, and there are scarce sources of illumination scattered at irregular intervals along the way.

She watches a beam of such light fall onto the dusty street with cold detachment and her voice is equally as cold when she asks.

“And what are you trying to say, Tamanegi? You don’t trust your Hokage’s judgement?”

The muscles in Tamanegi’s arm tense and it’s obvious that he did not expect the accusation, but there is no use claiming otherwise now. It’s no use because that is exactly what Sarada has been thinking for a while now, in the back of her mind, impervious to the influence of foreign forces yet feeling traitorous all the same. Because she trusts uncle Naruto with her life, and she believes him when he says that everyone in the village is his family.

Yet in Hoshigakure, a thousand miles and more from her home, thrust into enemy territory on foreign soil without much in the name of experience that might offer her some peace of mind that she is damn ready to face this, she feels helpless and voiceless and, worst of all, doubtful.

Doubtful that uncle Naruto has thought this through, and that he is bowing to the whims of the other Kage, under the instant pressure that comes along with this new world crisis. Because how are two kids and two legendary shinobi supposed to face an entire terrorist organization that supposedly wields poison with such deadly accuracy? As much as she loves uncle Sai, Sarada has been an active shinobi for long enough to understand that his orders might completely differ from whatever he tells them they are. If uncle Sai is anything, he is a criminally good ANBU operative.

Perhaps it’s the tired girl in her speaking, or maybe Tamanegi managed to hit the weakest link in her defence, but Sarada waits his answer with baited breath and a hundred reproaches and screams on the tip of her tongue.

But he only says, “I do. I’m probably one of the only ones who do, since I’ve decided to become a Leaf shinobi. But I’ve also learned one thing for sure, from a man who pretended parenthood,” ice drips off his words and he pauses as if to accumulate for dramatic effect, which makes Sarada hate him more, “and it is that you can never be too careful.”

“Lord Seventh is a _hero_!” Because admitting otherwise is like admitting defeat and growing up is fucking hard.

“ _Especially_ because he’s a hero.” Tamanegi insists in a frustrating show of backbone. “Never not doubt heroes and _always_ doubt _your_ heroes.”

It’s harder to disagree with him when he’s obviously speaking from painful experience. An experience that Sarada has been part of, but only for a little bit. The most painful bit even.

It’s as if a tap has been left open then, because the boy continues without qualm or the high and mighty attitude he usually professes.

“From what I’ve heard, your father never did paint himself the hero, even to you.”

Not that he wanted. Or tried. Or even could, not when he’d attack his own daughter because he didn’t know how she looked like after a decade of being away. Her father was far from the traditional definition of a hero, but in some instances, he also fit in it perfectly.

“And he definitely didn’t look like one when he killed fa-Shin.”

Cold, red eyes that hold the mangekyo sharingan pin her to the spot, their tomoes spinning lazily and Sarada feels her own inborn reflex to activate her bloodline limit rise at the sight of them.

“Which is exactly why I trust him more than the Hokage. Because he’s not hiding behind that title and he’s holding everyone who does that accountable. And for someone like me, that’s a pretty big difference.”

Sarada frowns. “What does that mean – _someone like you_?”

His mouth curves into something self-deprecating. “A weapon made by a madman to conquer the world for him. All the while, calling himself a true hero.”

It seems that the boy before her transforms from snide into bitter all at once. He extracts his arm from her grip and Sarada unclenches numb fingers she forgot about.

“Not many of my brothers still believe in a higher authority, but we are respectful of the Hokage, who saved us, and fearful of Sasuke-san, who almost killed us. That is why we keep in our lane for the most part.”

“Why did you want to become a Leaf shinobi, Tamanegi?” Sarada asks with trepidation. It’s not like she couldn’t stop him if he suddenly did something stupid, but she is more afraid that he will _say_ something stupid she won’t be able to simply forget and move on from.

He smiles something indecisive and Sarada curses the sharingan because she cannot read anything in his eyes besides that strange, spinning pattern.

“I wanted to see for myself. Who the real heroes are.” And then he relaxes all at once and rocks back on his heels. “And I also really like fighting and learning ninjutsu. Which is not something they will let civilians ever do without good reason.”

Sarada exhales and her shoulders slump. Her mind is busy, but she has no answer to offer as a counter to everything Tamanegi has just spilled. His philosophy might be a little bit skewed, but his heart seems to be in the right place. Or at least, a place that Sarada can sympathize with at the moment.

“I trust my father too,” she begins quietly, when the silence has dragged on for too long, “but only because he is my father and I know he’d never intentionally hurt me. But I also trust lord Seventh, but not because I’ve known him my whole life and I know that he is a good man.”

“Boruto keeps saying otherwise, you know?”

“Boruto is a proud idiot.” She throws a glare just because Tamanegi had the gall to interrupt her, but she soon continues around a deep breath, “I trust the Seventh because he is the Hokage and I’m a shinobi of the Leaf. And I’m going to continue to trust him until I can’t anymore.”

“And then?” There is no mercy to the question.

Sarada grits her teeth. She’s too out of it to think on it too much.

“And then we’ll see.”

The fact that she used the plural brings a strange expression over Tamanegi’s face.

“I will probably have to kick your ass for putting stupid ideas into my head though.”

There is no chuckle even though if it was Boruto or even Mitsuki, it would be the expected response. Instead, Tamanegi falls into step beside her and speaks only after they passed two corners and five lamplights.

“Do you think that’s why Sasuke-san left back then? That he lost faith in the whole system?”

It’s a good theory. And one straying uncomfortably close to a truth Sarada is dreading to hear.

So she keeps her mouth shut. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this got deep pretty fast so it's a rule that the next chapter has to be a little funny to counteract that because we're here for a good time and not a discourse on the shinobi society and its faults
> 
> or maybe we are.


	8. Day 17

* * *

**_Sarada's tip:_ ** _Be prepared for long and interminable journeys where nothing happens._

_But if you aren't - you must just be begging to get ambushed._

* * *

Sarada tugs on the straps of her backpack without much enthusiasm. Her gaze unknowingly slides in Tamanegi’s direction, but the boy is looking at her mother and there’s something in his gaze that seems starstruck.

Ever since the land of Tea, Sarada’s seen it often crop up and it doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. It’s a look featured on all the Shin boys when her mother pops up for a visit at the orphanage and through it Sarada – who has suffered so ardently for a father – has come to understand that these boys avidly want a mother. At least they are aware of the concept of it.

Someone to wipe the memory of their monster of a so-called father, to bring them clothes and fuss over whether they are well or not. And her mother had filled that slot perfectly.

It’s not even that Sakura was very aware of doing so, but Sarada guesses that motherhood must be so ingrained into her and Sarada’s never had any siblings, so maybe her mother has taken to this opportunity as eagerly as the Shin brothers did.

Jealously might have stemmed inside of her for some time, but it would be fruitless to ever doubt the love her mother holds for her. So Sarada decided to be the grown up and let them be, aware that her mother’s heart is big enough to encompass all of them. That, though, does not stop her from reminding them of their place in things. The last thing that she wants is to find a horde of Shin brothers in her home and there to stay.

Tamanegi’s just one of the unfortunate victims of her mother’s complete awesomeness. Sarada sometimes forgets it, so used to seeing all the other facets that make her mother _mama_ and not a legend.

“The formation will be the same, but you got to keep an eye out more often. You’ve got to coordinate with Sasuke-kun, though. Think you can do that?”

Even if Sarada wasn’t exactly listening, she nods because _yes, she will do her best to do that._ Tamanegi nods as well, speechless. Or maybe just back to his mute self, Sarada sees no difference.

Sakura crosses her arms, the look on her face telling them that she doesn’t quite believe it, but she grants them a free pass and turns to her father. He glares at the map in his only hand and Sarada counts down the seconds until it catches on fire.

“What’s wrong, dear?”

Her father opens his mouth, the fearsome expression on his face telling Sarada exactly what he thinks. Normally, she shouldn’t be able to figure it out, but their successful espionage and the conversation with Tamanegi opened up new avenues she never before thought possible.

Sasuke closes his mouth with an audible click and turns around.

“We should get going.”

The simple sentence brings along with it a thrill of mixed emotions, split evenly into halves – half fear, half excitement and half terror. But there is enough in the half of determination that the shinobi in Sarada gears up for the upcoming fight with a mentally loud cheer.

But the fight is late to come. They make record time as they pass through the land of Birds – which is, as implied, predominantly filled with birds that have Sarada’s mouth fall open in wonder.

Nothing comes out of the bushes to stop them and they pass into the land of Honey without a stutter to their steps. The lush forest slowly gives way to fewer trees, scattered in small clusters in between sprawling fields full of colourful flowers.

Sarada takes in the sight with boundless delight. She runs through the fields with breathless awe, raises her hands to brush soft fingertips over the purple, red and yellow petals. She can tell that her mother is equally as enchanted by this place as she is.

There is one moment that Sarada catches, more by mistake than by the talent of her observation skills.

Her father’s head is turned to her mother as she runs by his side and Sarada unknowingly catches the look he throws her, over the marginal softening of his expression and for a few excruciating heartbeats he seems to be in a trance. It’s a little mortifying to be a spectator to such a private moment, especially since her parents – her _father_ – is never one for romantic gestures or even hugging in public. It makes Sarada feel like an intruder, so she turns her attention elsewhere and stubbornly pretends that she never saw anything.

There are bees – of course they are, this is the Land of _Honey_ – but not as many as Sarada thought. After the experience with the land of Bears and even Birds, she thought that there would be some large swarms attacking them for trespassing into their territory – or worse, giant terrifying bees – but the insects don’t mind them and take flight out of their way as they continue steadily onwards.

They are sixty kilometres from the border when her father calls for a stop in a meadow hidden between the dark barks of the trees populating a surprisingly large thicket they’ve been travelling through for the past half hour. When possible, always stick to places where they wouldn’t be so easy to spot and attack, and she knows that the fields gave her father enough paranoid thoughts to last for a while.

“How are you two holding up?”

Her mother kneels before her and Sarada has no chance to reply before Sakura’s hands gently start probing her for injuries or fatigue. She hums absently as she does this and Sarada lets her, more intent to wonder why Tamanegi is sprawled on the ground next to her.

He usually likes to keep to himself and sit at the edge of their little campsites until it’s lights out. On this he resembles her father, so Sarada thinks that it must be an Uchiha thing, though why she is firmly not in that category must be because of her mother’s influence.

“You seem fine, Sarada honey.”

Sarada rolls her eyes at the unintended pun.

They avoided passing through any of the villages that sprung up along the way, but all signs on their outskirts advertised the best honey at the lowest prices.

Her mother’s expression dims when she examines Tamanegi. “You overworked yourself again, Tamanegi-kun.”

“I’m fine.” By how his voice is a rasp and he’s still breathing hard, Sarada doubts it. She is certain that her raised brow is not helping, but she can’t help herself.

Sakura clicks her tongue. “You should go to sleep directly after you eat. If you don’t, I will make you.”

The threat sits in the air for a few moments. Pale skin and all, blood still drains from Tamanegi’s face. Her mother’s smile is sweet when she sits up and saunters over to search through her backpack.

Feeling helpful today, Sarada tilts her head in his direction and whispers. “I suggest you listen.”

Tamanegi shoots her a badly veiled glare from the ground. “Thanks for the tip. I wasn’t about to challenge your mother anyways.” Sarada snickers.

“Sasuke-kun, we should take the same route when we return.”

Her mother rests her hands on her hips when papa doesn’t look up from preparing dinner.

“Why?”

“I want to buy some honey.” Sakura says simply, as if it should be obvious and it should. Her father is just always obtuse. “Ino kept nagging me for souvenirs and I think it would make a neat one. I’ve got a list of people I need to buy presents for.”

An eyebrow rises in a swift move. “I think _Ino_ and whoever else wants a present would understand that you were on a time-sensitive mission to save the world.”

Her mother scoffs, amused. “Which is why we’re buying them when we get back!”

As if they aren’t about to fight an insane organization of terrorists. Sarada is quietly entertained by her mother’s concerns. Papa seems to be speechless on this and mama turns around and brings the two kids each a vial of the vile purple liquid Sarada has seen fuming back on the ship.

Her nose scrunches up, definitely not excited to taste it. “What is that?”

Her mother grins at their expressions. “This is a universal anti-poison. The people we’re against are terribly good at poisons so I’ve made the most powerful antidote I knew. Hopefully it will be enough to keep at bay anything they throw at us.”

Sarada reaches for the bottle with hesitation. An unanswered thought prickles at the back of her mind.

“How come nothing happened to us from the poisoned water?”

Tamanegi came late to join the party, but Sarada was with her parents in Tanigakure and Sunagakure, both heavily affected areas.

Mama sits down near them, knees drawn up to her chest and rests her chin on her crossed hands.

“Hmm, well I have this theory in your case. Your father and I are resistant to the usual poisons and some powerful ones. And those antibodies we have, we passed on to you. So, you are more resistant to poisons than most people, Sarada.”

“Haa,” Sarada takes in the explanation with surprising ease, “I see. I kinda knew that mama wasn’t affected by poison, but I didn’t think that papa was, too.”

Her mother’s lips pucker slightly, though her tone doesn’t change. “Well, he spent enough time around Orochimaru that he didn’t have much choice.”

The statement feels heavy, but Sarada isn’t at all surprised. Orochimaru seems exactly that type of person, especially after all she’s seen in his hideout. Not for the first time, Sarada wonders why her father ever went to train under Orochimaru in the first place.

_Do you think that’s why Sasuke-san left back then?_

Sarada’s eyes narrow.

_That he lost faith in the whole system?_

In a system that, from the fragments scattered along her life that Sarada carefully gathered, apparently is to blame for the demise of her whole clan. Hints that, if she was anyone but herself, and if she was any less than a genius, Sarada would have entirely missed.

She bites her lip because she never expected that Tamanegi’s words will affect her so much. Her eyes drift to her father, busy watching over the cooking meat and the fire, and she wonders when the right time will be.

The right time to ask him to explain the past, to tell her a little bit more than the nothing she knows right now and to finally be able to ask the questions burning a hole through her soul. Maybe not today, but someday soon he might agree to finally entrust her with this information.

“Dinner’s ready.” Papa’s voice snaps Sarada out of her reverie.

She finds him looking at her, something indecipherable in his mismatched eyes like he just read her thoughts. Sarada brushes it off, determined not to let herself be goaded into revealing anything yet. Her father is very unlikely to say anything on the matter with an audience and in the middle of a mission.

They are halfway through dinner when her father opens another subject.

“From tomorrow on, we’re breaking into teams. Sarada and I will be at the front, Sakura and Tamanegi at the back. We’ll switch every few hours.”

One look at her mother tells Sarada that they’ve discussed this strategy beforehand.

“Now,” Sasuke looks first to his daughter, then to the boy that ended up being unintentional family. Even if they aren’t clones – and they definitely are not entirely related – Sakura isn’t the only one who saw that these boys need a guiding hand. This duty fell to Sasuke’s family, and he gladly accepted it. The Shin boys possess the sharingan – that is as much reason to keep an eye on them as the crest emblazoned on the back of their clothes, “in case we encounter enemies. Unless directly engaged, you will remain on the defensive. Gauge the weakness of the enemy and use it to win faster.”

As expected, Sarada’s mouth is open in a wordless outcry. He stops her with a look because he can guess what she wants to say.

“It’s no use spending all your chakra and energy fighting small fries. We don’t know what we will encounter from the Land of Forests onward. It is better to be careful.”

“Let us fight the small fries.” Sakura soothes, tousling Sarada’s hair with a soft smile. “Who knows if there will be time to rest in between.”

Their words must resonate, because Sarada grudgingly nods. Tamanegi offers his own agreement without fight, but Sasuke expected that. He listens to orders and does what he’s supposed to do without Sasuke needing to keep an eye out in case the boy does something stupid. That, unfortunately, does not apply to his own daughter, much to his aggravation, but that was to be expected.

Neither Sasuke nor his wife are much good at following orders if they find them lacking, though Sasuke hoped she wouldn’t take so much after him. Sakura can at least, pretend to follow orders and switch gears when she judges them to be obsolete.

“Where is the hideout located?”

Sarada shoots Tamanegi a look, trying to silently communicate something with him and Sasuke is inwardly surprised to see them on such good speaking terms. The tense atmosphere from before seems to have mostly dissipated in the days they’ve been travelling on the continent.

“Five kilometres out of Kagerou village in the Land of Mountains. It will take us about three days to get there.”

Sarada seems surprised that he offered the information and Sasuke knows that his hunch was right. Though that brings a slew of other subjects he will have to find a way to discuss with her afterwards.

“We are supposed to find the ringleader and capture him. Apprehending small fry is supposed to be the ANBU’s job.”

“I think we covered what we needed to talk about, right?”

Sakura asks mildly and Sasuke sees that Tamanegi is stifling a yawn and the circles under Sarada’s eyes are more prominent in the firelight. So he nods and leaves the kids to prepare for bed under his wife’s watchful eyes while Sasuke jumps as near to the top of the closest tree as he dares in order to scout out their surroundings.

He stays like that, concentrated on any chakra signature that might disturb his senses. It is a neat trick he picked from Karin for non-sensitive people, though Sasuke prides himself on being better at it than most. He is aware though, that in Karin’s eyes, everyone seems non-sensitive.

Sasuke doesn’t register the moon climb to its apex, but he does open his eyes when Sakura climbs up after him.

“Something wrong?”

The question is loaded, but Sasuke refuses to give voice to the numerous whims he holds. Sakura is worried enough about the near future, that it would be a moot point to thrust more things in her direction. So he shakes his head and drapes his cloak over her form when her arms close around him.

Sasuke closes his eyes again and rests his chin on top of her head, taking solace in her steady heartbeats. This time he dares not let so much time pass before he gently coaxes Sakura to go get some rest. He will take first watch and, hopefully, the only watch. He’s always loath to wake his wife to take his place.

* * *

DAY 18

Sarada trembles awake at some point in the night because she kicked her cover in her sleep and the weather turned icy the longer into the night the forest descended. She blinks away long enough to tuck the irritating material back over herself, though she slips her glasses on with her other hand, more out of habit than anything else.

Her eyesight is still bleary with sleep when she spots her mother’s face a few feet away, sleeping soundly and she has to blink to realize that her head is resting in her father’s lap. Papa leans against a tree trunk, head turned to the leaf canopy overhead and Sarada thinks she sees the purple glow of the rinnegan scouting for any visible stars in between the holes left by the leaves.

But her theory dispels as soon as her eyelids fall back closed.

* * *

Early morning dew clings to her hair and curls it at the edges. Sarada ineffectually tugs at it in the hopes that it will return to its original position without further embarrassing her, but it just won’t cooperate. She can’t say that she’s surprised though.

Not when her mother’s hair is luscious and shiny in the humidity while her father’s starts to resemble the hairstyle he wore when he was twelve. Sarada is certainly stuck in the middle of the odd spectrum and, for once, she is thankful for that.

Tamanegi has the advantage of slicked back hair stuck to his head. The white strands barely dare to rebel, though Sarada inadvertently glimpses some when she turns to speak to him.

They pass into the Land of Forests before the sun is properly up, but the landscape turns similar to the one in the land of Bears, though here the trees are secular and the darkness all the more encompassing when she dares to glance down towards the ground.

Sarada tenses at every wrong shadow, every strangely shaped branch, every cry of an animal.

“Sarada,” her father says calmly and Sarada activates her sharingan.

The landscape looks the same, she can’t find anything wrong. A quick glance to her father tells her that he is also watching their surroundings for any sign of the enemy. The rinnegan is a dull color in the dim light filtering through the canopy of leaves.

Nothing happens that day, not until sunset.

When the enemy nin do decide to finally attack, Sarada is prepared for them.

A kunai slides into her hand as three bodies come from above, but her father flings her behind him, back near the trunk of the tree they stopped on.

Gritting her teeth against the rattling force of her father’s throw and her own frustration at being relegated to stand back, Sarada stands back to back with Tamanegi and they both watch the fight unfold.

Mama comes from above with a mighty yell and decimates a good portion of the nearest tree. It leaves the ground shake and the branch under her feet vibrates with the force. She takes down two, but one springs up again, not yet beaten.

The last is facing off with papa, though he is no match for his skills, and he is quickly cut down.

It takes her mother two more minutes to put down the last one, but that is just because the man has some skill with ninjutsu.

“This was obviously a test to gauge our strength.” Her father says as he sheathes his sword. “Let’s move on.”

Her mother switches places with her father and Sarada marches ahead alongside her mama. The quiet strength she knows so well is as reassuring as papa’s own presence and it gives Sarada enough incentive to continue onwards.

But it is hard to navigate in the dark. The light was already in short supply before, but by the time the sun dips in the west, they can hardly step forward and trust that they know where they will land.

Papa pushes and Sarada knows that he would have wanted to at least get to the mountain strait today, but her mother argues that they are only five kilometres away.

“And passing the strait in the dark is just asking them to take us down. I’d much rather see who wants to stab me.”

Her father concedes on that point and they make camp on a lower branch that is large enough to accommodate them sleeping without the danger of falling off. But that does not certify a good night’s sleep.

“I don’t know what’s down there.” Sasuke says simply when she asks.

“And at this point, I’m afraid to find out.” Her mother adds, a little exasperated, as she builds a makeshift fire.

Sarada snuggles under her blanket, staring at the shadows tightening around them.

“Let me take the first shift.” Her mother whispers, though none of them had gone to sleep yet.

A few feet away, Tamanegi’s face is scrunched up in concentration as he draws a seal on his wrist. Sarada resolutely turns away and waits for sleep to take her but it only comes in fits and bursts.

She shifts restlessly for most of the night and it is actually a reprieve when papa comes to wake her up. Sarada is coiled like a spring, ready to jump, ready to fight. She stretches her senses more and more, the closer they get to the mountain strait.

When the forest finally opens and the ground clears into a dull brown rock, Sarada expels a breath as her eyes struggle to adjust to the overwhelming brightness. It takes her another moment to make out the rusty iron bridge connecting the two cliff faces. Beyond, down in the canyon, water churns as it struggles to flow from the ocean to the small sea out east.

She thinks they made it for another three seconds before the bridge explodes in a shower of debris and sparks. A plum of smoke burns her skin as it disperses along the shockwave.

Sarada drops to the ground, hands above her head and clenches her teeth hard against the vibrations in the ground. She wails inside her mind, a moment of weakness before she staggers to her feet towards the place where her parents are already standing, back to back, weapons drawn.

Tamanegi draws up behind her, his clothes as dirty as Sarada’s surely are.

The curtain of smoke is blown away by the powerful breeze and leaves in its wake a small army of masked men. Sarada counts at least fifty, all holding weapons and hiding their identities as best as they can.

It is nothing organized, and they don’t seem professional shinobi, but they are certainly not just civilians. Not by the way they hold their weapons and angle their bodies. They are used to fighting and they are used to winning.

“Be careful.” Her mother has time to warn her and Tamanegi before the first wave of attackers is upon them.

Her mother balls her hand into a fist and hits the nearest poor soul, who immediately goes flying in the other direction, taking a few more in his path.

Papa is already in the middle of the fray, the only thing visible left is his sword. Sarada watches the blade glint in the sunlight and hears the shattered screams as his enemies fall one after another.

The ground shakes as her mother hits her heel, creating a crater and leaving a few more unconscious on the ground. Sarada knows that she’s curbing her power, trying not to damage the cliff face they are stranded on.

Her thoughts come to a halt when Tamanegi’s back disappears from where it was pressed against hers. A scream is cut short, but Sarada’s attention shifts to the incoming enemy on her right.

The dour man with an axe running towards her quickly stumbles when three kunai stab the ground before his feet. Sarada somersaults over his head and rotates her body and aims a kick to his back. The man skids a few meters and falls on his face, but there is no time to relax because another one is advancing.

She disables the next three ones without problems and is in the middle of sending a fourth one to his fate when a pair of hands grabs her by the scruff of her clothes and lift her off the ground. Sarada’s stomach drops along with her blood pressure as she watches the ground getting farther and farther away.

Her frantic gaze searches for any familiar form in the crowd and her mouth opens in a panicked yell.

“Papa!”

Her father’s head jerks to the side almost instantly and Sarada isn’t sure, but she thinks his eyes widen and something close to panic slides on his face as well, but in the next moment he is back to his usual poise. He starts running, absently cutting down whoever dares to get in his way.

Sasuke is too far away to try aiming a Chidori sharp spear and his other techniques are likewise not recommended because Sarada might be caught up in the attack too. So he launches forward, aiming a handful of shuriken coated with lightning chakra, but they only thunk off the flying enemy.

Sarada’s head snaps upwards, the simple sound a yell to wake up and pull herself together. Her eyes widen when she sees that it is a man holding her captive and flying along the strait with the help of a strange metallic device.

Out of reflex, her sharingan activates and Sarada catches the unmistakable flow of chakra from the mechanism, but her dojutsu is no byakugan and she can’t make any further verdicts. Instead, she grits her teeth and studies her predicament. The man wears strange gloves with a metallic skeleton that makes his grip stronger than it should be.

It would be unwise to make him drop her, especially when he is flying so close to the edge of the cliff. Thinking hard, Sarada reaches into her pouch for shuriken and a line of wire. She throws two of them in quick succession, but only one is attached to that wire.

Sarada smirks at the scoff she receives from her captor. The shuriken collide in mid-air and the one attached with her wire buries itself in the upper back of the enemy. His momentary shock, coupled with the inborn reflex against the pain, makes his grip loosen but Sarada grips the wire and climbs onto his back in one fluid motion.

“You-!”

Her smirk widens at her success and she presses a kunai against the man’s throat.

“Bring me back down _nicely_!”

The muscles in his neck contract and Sarada knows one second before it happens that he will try to do something stupid.

She barely has time to break the mechanism of the flying device before she throws herself off while the man aims himself with a snarl into the ravine.

Sarada closes her eyes as the ground grows closer, but a glowing purple hand catches her. The landing is less painful than it would have been, but it still hurts like hell and it prompts her to release a whimper as she rolls off.

“Are you alright?”

Her father’s hand touches her arms, her back, trying to find if there is anything wrong with her. Sarada cracks her eyes open and tries to offer him a reassuring grimace.

“Sarada!”

Her mother’s voice is close and footsteps thud on the ground as Sarada dares to sit up with a grunt.

“I’m fine! What the hell was that?”

“That flying device is similar to the one they used in the land of Sky.” Mama is unsettled and Sarada’s eyes widen with the information. Her father nods in agreement and looks to the sky. When she follows his gaze, Sarada bites back a swear at the sight of three more of those fliers circling above their heads.

“I doubt they have a full army.” His eyes narrow. “But they know how to fly with those things.”

As if Sarada needed a reminder. She accepts her father’s hand and he lifts Sarada to her feet.

“Aim with katon and shoot them down.” He orders to both her and Tamanegi. “We will take care of the ones on the ground.”

Papa exchanges a nod with mama and they both shoot off to fight. Sarada’s hands run through the hand seals for the fireball jutsu and she aims at the flying pests.

But as many as they shoot down, more seem to take their places. Her father was right about the number of flyers being limited. Sarada and Tamanegi shoot down two more over the last three, but the men on the ground seem to multiply instead of decrease, and from the snarl her mother wears on her face Sarada knows that it is only a matter of time before her temper explodes along with the cliff they are standing on.

The sun has long disappeared behind a curtain of black clouds that threaten to rain down on them, arcs of lightning snaking through. Looking at them, Sarada frowns, thinking back and realizing that there was no sign of rain this morning.

A large breath of air transforms into fire next to her, singing the ends of Sarada’s hair and her mouth is open and ready to offer Tamanegi a piece of her mind when it clicks. Her eyes widen and she looks up at the sky again. The clouds – they made them form by sending hot air into the cooler atmosphere.

Sarada admires it for one more moment, before she jumps back along with Tamanegi at her mother’s orders. They follow her lead, gathering the remaining enemies in as tight a circle as they can.

“Stand back!”

Mama pushes her and Tamanegi behind her back but Sarada chances a look over her shoulder. She sees her father standing just on the edge, Chidori crackling in his hand. He lifts it up, points it to the sky and, for a moment, Sarada is afraid that he will be struck. Instead, a giant lightning dragon descends from the sky, snarling and narrowing its blood red eyes on the enemy. It crashes on the ground with a mighty roar over the sound of her father’s calm voice.

“Kirin!”

Kirin leaves Sarada breathless, long after her mother left them standing on the precipice of the disaster and ran to her father’s side. She isn’t aware of speaking until she catches Tamanegi’s side eyed glance.

“I gotta learn this move.”

* * *

“They know we’re coming for them.” Her mother says, breathless as she walks next to her father back towards them.

Sarada’s hands curl into loose fists as she wonders what exactly their next move is. The sensible thing would be to retreat and shake their enemies off their tails, but they don’t have time for that.

“We continue on.” Her father answers her mother’s silent question.

Sakura’s mouth thins and her eyes narrow. “Sasuke-kun,” she begins but her father cuts her off.

“They already know we are coming, Sakura. And we have no time to lose searching for a new angle to surprise them on.” He seems overly tired, but his body is rigid and still poised for a fight. “It would be counterproductive to do anything than move forward.”

Her mother expels a long breath through her nose. “Fine.” Though she is obviously not exalted with the plan.

Garuda appears from a plum of smoke and lifts them all to the other side of the strait before her father dismisses him. While they run, mama slaps two chakra patches on her in quick succession before doing the same to Tamanegi. The effect helps somewhat and takes off the edge of the aches steadily making themselves known through her body.

In absence of something to do, she studies their surroundings as they run, keeping an industrious eye out for any incoming ambush.

The Land of Vegetables is a country with far reaching fields full of crops and plants, cultivated on the incredibly fertile soil it boasts. They take a dirt road snaking through countless fields that leave Sarada slack jawed.

She spots people working along the way, but unlike on the eastern side of the continent, not many lifts their heads to peer at the strangers passing through their land.

This country isn’t as small as she imagined, but papa guides them with a sure spring in his steps, as if he’s memorized the map beforehand. His pace never stutters, not even after the fiasco this morning and a whole day of travelling afterwards he doesn’t look to be breaking much of a sweat. Mama too – she looks to be recuperating her strength while she runs than the other way around.

Before she asks her parents to teach her ninjutsu, Sarada thinks that they should teach her the secret behind their industrial sized energy reservoir. She thought that her stamina was better than this, yet she finds herself gradually losing breath, her legs start to burn, and her lungs seem clogged with the warm air of twilight. 

Tamanegi, to her relief, seems to be on the same path as her, which means that her parents are monsters. Sarada’s heard it all her life – how powerful they are, all their accomplishments and every story that is whispered with unrestrained awe, yet she’s never witnessed first-hand what exactly this means. She can’t exactly fault them for never showing their true strength – there is no chance to show that in Konohagakure in such a restrained setting.

But Sarada is still left in quiet awe and not for the first time there is a tinge of regret that she’s never pushed more for her mother to train her. Granted, there were extenuating circumstances all around, but Sarada still feels like she has no excuse.

“Stay here.”

Her father’s form disappears before his words truly register and a flicker of fear catches onto Sarada before she makes sense of what he said.

Mama grabs her shoulder, but her gaze is wandering around the perimeter. They are on the border – that much is clear because even with the dimming sunlight, the colossal shapes of mountains scattered in the distance can be clearly seen on the dark blue skyline. The horizon is pierced with countless peaks, taller and taller as if in competition to touch the moon.

A whistle comes and her mother spurns her on. There is no definitive border, but it is as obvious as when you pass from the Land of Fire to the Land of Wind. Even the air changes. It seems fresher, more invigorating than the warm humidity they’ve encountered in the land of Vegetables during the day.

The nearest set of hills rise from the ground and melt into jagged crags as they build up the first mountain nearest the border. They house a set of caves that connect underground that they use as a rest stop.

Her father doesn’t let her leave the lip of the cave entrance though.

“We will camp out here. Don’t wander inside.”

“Do you know where it goes, papa?” Sarada finds herself asking, overcome with curiosity.

Tamanegi not so gently kick at a stalagmite, but it only gives him an injured foot in return.

By the way her father purses his lips, Sarada thinks he doesn’t.

“It’s possible they go through the mountain complex, or just link one side of the hill with the other. Either way,” and here his eyes narrow into a warning, “they might be shelter to wild and dangerous animals.”

“Or just dangerous bandits and hunters.”

Her mother adds casually, not in the least concerned about sleeping in a cave full of beasts and beast hunters. But then again, she has been entirely in her element since this whole thing started.

“Oh.”

But Sarada can barely close her eyes. Not when there is a lightning dragon perpetually imprinted behind her eyelids or when her traitorous brain starts re-enacting the feeling of freefalling from the sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> what do you know? they are finally fighting the enemy and stuff


	9. Day 19

* * *

**_Sarada's tip:_ ** _Always have a backup plan in case of: kidnapping, attempted murder, infiltration through the enemy stronghold._

_But if you don't - **never** let papa make a plan on his own._

* * *

She manages to lose consciousness for a few hours, she thinks when she blinks groggily and looks at the rising sun. Beyond the jagged mouth of the cave, her mother sits near a small pond with her back to it.

Sarada gingerly sits up and makes her way towards her, mindful not to wake her father or Tamanegi, though she is awfully tempted to kick him just for the heck of it, which is perpetually confounding to her.

Mama smiles widely when she sees Sarada.

“Good morning.”

The familiarity of the greeting and the way Sarada is rubbing at her eyes makes her mind misplace them for a moment and she almost believes they’re back home. But then the crisp air and the chirping of the birds in the forest on the hill remind her that there is an entire criminal organization that has to fall before that happens.

“Morning, mama.”

“How are you?”

Sarada frowns when she realizes that her mother has a small stack of wet clothes next to her and there is one of her father’s shirts clutched in her hands, floating in the water.

“’M fine. What are you doing?”

Mama hums mildly. “Washing some clothes. Your father has the awful habit of taking few clothes and dirtying them to hell.”

Sarada giggles behind her hand. In the tall grass, she curls her knees close to her chest and watches her mother in silence as she continues with her chore.

“Can I help with anything?”

“No darling, don’t worry.” Her hands pause. Sarada waits for her mother to say what’s on her mind. “You did really well yesterday. Almost gave me a heart attack, but I’m used to it.”

She laughs, though it’s a dose sourer than it’s supposed to be. Sarada has this preconceived notion about her mother, after living with the woman all her life.

She is aware that if there will ever be a choice between the world and Sarada, her mother will choose her daughter without a second thought. It’s a warming, staggering thought, to be chosen before literally anyone else, but Sarada is foremost afraid of that day if it ever comes.

They keep saying that the Uchiha clan loves deeply and on a whole other level, but if that is the case, then her mother is a rightful member of the clan simply by her capacity to offer such a steady and strong love without asking for anything in return.

“Sorry,” though she doesn’t know what she’s sorry about.

Mama chuckles. “Stop with that. I get enough of those from your father.”

There is something there, almost fond, but infinitely sad. Sarada decides that it’s too early to dig further.

“Just – be careful please.” It is in the heaviness of her mother’s sigh that Sarada understands that this is not the usual mission. Not when her daughter is in the first line of fire.

Sarada rests her chin on her knees and smiles. “Promise.”

* * *

There’s an overabundance of wildlife where there were only cultivated fields before. The mountains are bursting with animals, populating the thick forests and high slopes. Most peaks are filled with snow and glint in the sunlight with no cloud in sight.

Sarada keeps close to Tamanegi, who in turn keeps close to her father as they walk along a ravine. They are heading north and the difference in temperatures is so obvious that she almost shivers.

Thicker clothes are stored in a deep recess of her backpack, but Sarada does not have the inclination to start searching for them.

The jagged edge they are toeing is enough to set her teeth on edge as memories from yesterday intrude in her jumbled thoughts. She’s had enough near-death experiences with falling from high distances and she does not need a repeat.

“How long until we reach Kagerou Village?” Tamanegi suddenly asks at one point in their journey while they are traversing a rather insecure rope bridge over a large chasm between two mountains.

The drop is so deep that Sarada only sees the misty clouds hanging below her feet, like a false pillow that won’t cushion her if she falls. The boy behind her struggles to keep himself upright, his muscles so tense they are trembling.

“We won’t enter Kagerou tonight.” Her father’s words are decisive. “There are about six hours left until we reach the outskirts where we’ll camp out.”

There is an intangible plan that Sarada has intuited to exist but has resigned herself to never knowing and her father follows it to the dot. He knows all the paths, all the steps and all the corners he needs to sidestep. There are distances not covered in maps, but he measures them with his mind’s eye and makes an approximation of the travel time like some kind of mystical foreseer. It is overwhelming and it is infuriating, how he is aware of everything and anything.

As if the universe wishes to prove her point, her father derails them from the main dirt path and they climb higher.

“There are many bears on that path.”

And Sarada wants to cry out to the heavens – who closer than usual – and ask how he can possibly know that.

Tamanegi heaves a sigh that Sarada easily catches and she turns to see him deactivating his sharingan with a grimace. She should ask, she knows, but that would mean probably starting an argument and needling where it’s better left alone, so she clamps her mouth shut and burns circles in her father’s back.

They are supposed to stop an hour out of Kagerou Hidden Village, but unlike Konoha where there are many small villages clinging on the outskirts of the bustling town, here there is only wilderness and the occasional pack of wolves.

Kagerou is hidden between three tall mountains that stand like sentinels and ban their way forward. Sarada can’t even spot the artificial lights of the village, so well it is hidden behind trees and rock.

“This works, I guess.” Her mother taps her chin as she surveys their campsite. They are in a small patch of woods, likewise hidden from whatever scout the village might send, nestled between two secular trees and one branch of a river with crystal clear waters.

It is so cold that the tips of Sarada’s fingers go numb.

_No chance for a bath tonight_ , she thinks mournfully.

Tamanegi keels over and is long asleep by the time Sarada makes it back to her own sleeping bag.

“Sarada,” at the sound of her father’s voice she looks up into the trees.

He gestures for her to climb up and she does, curious to see what he has to say.

“I need your help to scout out the edge of the forest.” Sarada’s gaze travels through the copse of trees, towards the open plateau that climbs with an incline until it melts into the mountain. “With the sharingan.”

_Well then_.

Sarada would like nothing more than to sleep, but that little insufferable idiot went ahead and did so without remorse. She sighs because whether Tamanegi was awake or not, if her father asks her, Sarada will agree anyways.

So she nods and follows him through the trees and down to the grassy plain. Grass tickles her toes and she snuggles deeper into her coat, even as her bloodline limit activates and she can suddenly see all the chakra around them.

Which is certainly not much. There are only small animals skittering around the expanse and the insignificant, but still detectable chakra of plants that pulsates where it meets the ground.

Her breath fans out into a small cloud and disappears in the cold atmosphere of the night. Cold bitten fingers slip into the pockets of her jacket as she follows a mindless path further ahead, near the gurgling river. Sarada is aware of her father’s chakra signature somewhere further back, and with that reassuring presence behind her she stalks further ahead.

She is unsure how far they travelled, but at some point there is a hum in the air that transforms into an outright vibration inside her chest. Sarada frowns as she looks around, then back to her father only to find him nowhere.

Flashing panic registers a second before inspiration strikes and she looks up to see an arc of lightning and something falling to the ground.

Her father suddenly materializes next to her.

“They found us.”

His words are steely and his eyes glow with a strange light in the darkness. Sarada’s mouth dries with dread.

“What do we do?”

She follows her father’s gaze, eyes sliding from side to side as he tries to come up with a plan.

“It’s too risky to return and besides,” this time Sarada dreads what _he_ has to say, “this is as good an opportunity as any to infiltrate in their hideout.” He looks at her. “Go back to your mother-“

Sarada’s right hand fists into the material of his cloak. “No way you’re going there alone!” She says through gritted teeth, whisper-yelling so as to not give their position away.

There is a minute of suffocating silence before she feels her father nod and shift his body towards her.

“One of them tried to place a sleeping jutsu on me.”

“Genjutsu?”

“Jutsu.”

_Oh_ , Sarada thinks, _those are rare and complicated to deal with_.

“Next time I will let him.”

“ _What_!” Her voice climbs a few decibels higher.

Her father throws her a reproaching glance.

“You can dispel it, just use the sharingan.”

“What if it’s not sharingan-dispersible?!”

He looks at her blankly. “Then we’ll be in trouble.”

Sarada wants to punch him, or at least punch something because this is the worst plan ever and she can’t believe everyone’s been praising her father’s genius tactical abilities for naught. He can come up with the worst of plans in the most dangerous situations. Sarada wonders how he’s not dead, but then figures that it might be because of her mother or uncle Kakashi. They usually make good plans when they want to.

She doesn’t have time to reply because the humming is back again. It takes Sarada a few moments to place it and realize that it is actually another one of those flying devices. Cloaked in the darkness and with a chakra suppressing seal, it is virtually undetectable. No wonder it could take her father by surprise when nothing else in the world generally does.

“Get ready.”

A snake slithers from under his sleeve and gets lost in the tall grass.

Sarada snaps her gaze back to him and she doesn’t even know how he plans to bring her along. That question is answered a second later when he grabs her around the middle and pushes her under the cloak, so that maybe, hopefully, their soon-to-be captor won’t figure out that he’s not only capturing Uchiha Sasuke.

Sarada’s stomach drops to the feet for the second time in two days and she clings to her father because her life depends on it at this point. His grip loosens marginally and Sarada bites back a whimper of fright.

Right, so the jutsu is in place. Papa didn’t have the decency to tell her exactly how long she has to wait before waking him up, but she figures that the best choice would be to do that when they are close to the hideout.

Of course, in this darkness she can’t see anything, so she’ll just have to play by her luck and the hope that the infernal machine follows the laws of general physics.

Until that point though, Sarada will continue to cling to her father like a monkey and curse his awful plans.

* * *

Sakura quenches the fire and squints through the darkness for her daughter and her husband, but they are nowhere to be seen.

The forest is eerily silent, and the swishing of the leaves is starting to grate on Sakura’s nerves. Something in her gut tells her that something happened and then her mind starts stuttering through the awful possibilities and she steps forward, intent to move and _do something_ , lest she goes crazy. She’s never been good at following logic when her most precious people are concerned.

But then her eyes fall on Tamanegi. The boy is sleeping soundly at the base of a gnarly tree and Sakura finds herself torn. She is loath to leave him alone and unprotected, but there is also the dreary possibility that something happened to Sasuke and Sarada and she needs to know _what_.

All her worries prove a moot point in the end when a small young snake slithers and curls around her shin. Sakura startles at the cold touch but crouches down and lets the small animal climb into her open palm. The blue-purple scales tell her that it really is one of her husband’s summons.

If it’s here, then that means only one thing.

Sakura exhales her most tired breath yet and doesn’t even let the snake relay the message.

“They did something insanely stupid, didn’t they?”

* * *

DAY 20

It feels like an eternity, but it might be actually only half an hour. It looks like flying gets you farther faster than running or walking.

The land below has properly descended into an impenetrable darkness, broken only by black peaks of mountains illuminated by the moon in the sky. They might as well have passed over the border, though the landscape never changes. If anything, there are even more mountains now and they pass by them. This excursion might be breath taking if she wasn’t captured by a possible terrorist and taken to his hideout with her immobilised father in tow.

Their captor is incredibly silent and above the hum of the apparatus on his back, she can’t even hear him breathe. Which is incredibly unnerving, if she is going to be honest.

Sarada dares a peek from behind the cover of her dad’s cloak and there is a great deal of squinting and squirming to get a better angle, but she makes out his face, his arms and the mechanism on his back. His head seems pointed straight forward, though he periodically looks down below.

Sarada retreats, munching on her lower lip and readjusts the grip she has on her father’s shirt as she thinks. It will be incredibly risky to wake him up, especially since the man might be able to spot her activated sharingan through the darkness. But if she angles it perfectly, he might not be able to.

Once her father fell asleep, his head lolled down, chin tucked against his chest. She will need to apply a small flicker of lightning chakra to get him to open his eyes and then try the impossible and wake him up.

There is a sudden stutter and Sarada’s heart drops along with the altitude. Heart hammering inside her chest, she swallows down whatever uncertainness she still harbours and locks it at the back of her mind.

Her left hand unlocks its grip and forms the tiger hand seal.

“Kai!”

Nothing noticeable happens, but Sarada expected this. Unsteadily, she reaches up and touches her father’s forehead, pressing her fingertips to surround both of his eyes. A familiar electrifying feeling that comes along with the Lightning element shivers through her veins. Sarada tries her best to make the current just a small shock and she bites back a delighted cheer when her father’s eyes open.

Papa’s eyes are blank and lost in whatever haze of a dream he’s fallen into.

“Please work.” She pleads with the frigid air and the relentless wind.

The higher field of vision that comes along with the sharingan lights the world in the color of chakra and microscopic perception. She does her best to meet her father’s eyes, though it is a difficult task when there is no one to look back at her.

Building chakra behind her eyes, Sarada feels a thrum behind her head, as something behind her pupils pulsates in time with her heartbeat. She forms the tiger seal again and directs everything she has into the sharingan.

Without nothing to say, she finds herself mouthing “Kai,” again. The pulsing intensifies until it burns, and she’s lost in her father’s black and purple eyes for one long heartbeat.

A pause follows when she comes back to herself, her sharingan disappearing. It is disheartening and petrifying all at once. All she can think is that she failed and now she is a hostage and her father is probably lost forever in some kind of dream world.

But then his body seizes, noticeably enough to Sarada who is practically glued to him, but otherwise incredibly subtle.

Their captor looks down, but her father is either insanely attuned to his surroundings when he just came back to himself, or he’s not awake.

Yet he blinks by his own volition and he tilts his head marginally.

Sarada buries eyes full of tears in his chest and tries hard not to sob with relief.

His hold on her is the most secure she’s felt in a long time.

The flight comes to an end soon after, which confirms to Sarada that her intuition was right, and they are approaching home base. Which is just as well, because she can’t feel either her legs or arms, long numb with cold and the effort of holding onto papa.

She isn’t sure how useful she will be if there is an immediate need to fight, which is embarrassing enough, but at least she can continue to cling to her father if the worst comes.

Their journey comes to a halting stop as the man drops her father to the ground rather mercilessly. But their captor does not have the time to land, because a lightning sword erupts from her father’s outstretched hand and through the enemy’s chest.

He drops dead without a sound besides the heavy clank of the machine on his back.

“Let’s go, Sarada.”

Sarada keeps close to her father, measuring her footsteps and trying to keep them as soundless as possible against the uneven ground. They are somewhere in a forest, on a mountain if the slope she fights to climb is anything to go by.

Papa’s form blends into the shadows as if he’s made out of them. She wouldn’t be able to keep track of him if he didn’t mind himself and slowed down his pace for her to keep up. The forest around them is eerily silent and it keeps Sarada’s heart beating heavily as her mind pictures all kinds of traps and ambushes that can happen. She’s so lost in her thoughts that she almost collides with her father’s back when he abruptly stops.

They are on the edge of a large clearing, but they are not alone. Torches are lit, their flames dancing wildly in the powerful wind. Sarada feels it snapping at her cheeks and the exposed flesh on her arms and legs, but she still props herself fully against a tree and tries to study the place they’ve stumbled onto.

It is certainly the entrance to their enemies’ hideout. She spots the large cave mouth almost immediately. It seems a collaboration of natural factors and the human hand, blending so fully in the landscape, yet its edges rounded to an artificial degree to permit as big of a space as possible. The clearing is filled with small, yellowing grass, trampled over by numerous pairs of feet. It goes on for about two hundred meters before it ends in a precipice. Sarada does not dare imagine how high they are, or what is down below, if there is anything besides tall trees with piercing tips and jagged rocks.

She hears her father shift on his feet and she patiently waits as he makes his way to her side.

“We will use henge for now.”

Sarada is almost scandalized by his words. “Shouldn’t we wait for backup?”

The look papa throws her is filled with the kind of obstinacy Sarada belatedly recognizes as one of her very present character traits.

“It will be better to scout the place out thoroughly. No use stopping here.”

He forms a hand seal and disappears in a cloud of smoke. In his stead, a man slightly resembling their captor emerges. Sarada eyes his second arm dubiously.

“Wouldn’t they realize that they’ve never seen us before?”

Her father shrugs, unconcerned. “It’s not like I expect to keep up appearances for long. We just need a way in.” He steps away, almost out of the treeline and Sarada’s heart thunders as adrenaline kicks in. She hesitates.

“Let’s go,” papa turns his head, his eyes boring into hers, seeing though her, “we only have five hours to scout it out.”

Sarada devises the henge to look like a man, not unlike her father’s appearance, though with distinctively different hair and eyes and she adds a beard just because she’d rather be unnecessarily creative than pay attention to her sudden bout of nerves. But something still bothers her as he follows him into the cave.

“What do you mean we only have five hours?”

* * *

The first thing Sakura does is wake up Tamanegi and pack up the camp as fast as she can.

The second thing she does is give the poor kid a soldier pill and pat him on the back reassuringly.

And the third thing she does, in that exact order, is send a swift curse in her dear husband’s direction for putting her in this position. Sakura also does not necessarily like what he told her to do.

Their feet thud on the ground as they run under the stark night full of stars. They will have to cut through the outskirts of Kagerou Village even though she is sure that someone will have something to say about that. But then again, Sakura isn’t above creating an international incident, especially when it comes to her husband and her daughter’s safety.

Naruto can handle it, that’s why he didn’t make Hokage until Tsunade-shishō and Kakashi-sensei were generally confident in his ability not to fistfight the first diplomat that steps on his toes.

After careful calculations, Sakura figures that it will take them about five hours, give or take depending on how many people would be standing in their way and how Tamanegi manages under the strain.

Speaking of, the boy inclines his head to the side and asks.

“May I ask you something, mama?”

Sakura nods and a small smile plays on her lips. “Of course, Tamanegi-kun.”

“Were Sarada and Sasuke-san abducted by the terrorists?”

“Not exactly,” and the thought brings forth a fresh wave of irritation, “my darling husband decided that it would be a good idea to let himself get captured. And he took Sarada along, to boot.”

Tamanegi does not offer any visible reaction to the information. He only absorbs it and moves on.

“And what is the plan now?”

“We have to get there as quickly as we can. I’m pretty sure no infiltration plan they have will work indefinitely.” She lifts a finger, vying for attention in the dark night. “Listen closely – when we get there, I will start to destroy everything in my way. Your job is to find Sarada and Sasuke and make sure you all get out before everything comes down.”

This time the boy looks properly perturbed, as he should be. Sakura had no chance to veto her husband’s stupid plan. Sometimes she wonders if he’s as bad as Naruto, and then she remembers that as much as he preaches to be a genius, _he is as bad as his best friend is_.

* * *

Sarada looks around them as inconspicuously as she can. Unaware of where exactly they are going, she keeps half a step behind her father, who also does not know their exact destination, but walks around the place as if he owns it. His steps are sure and unhurried as if he hadn’t just left her with the ominous time interval of five hours, after which her mother is supposed to arrive and properly wreck this place up.

The cave they entered quickly transformed from a long, chilly hallway into a set of stairs carved into stone. They climbed down countless steps, down and down, round and round until Sarada’s mind was rolling around as well. Torches climbed the walls so there was no chance of getting jumped in such luminosity, but they were also pretty spottable.

The thing is – they’ve encountered numerous people – both men and women – and none of them had batted an eye in their direction.

“Some of them are missing nin.” Papa remarks offhandedly and Sarada nods. She’s seen the cut headbands, but not all of them have one. “The others must be mercenaries.”

“Or maybe civilians.”

“Only if they were properly trained. They seemed to know what they were doing the last time we fought them.”

The thought brings a grimace to Sarada’s face. Her father continues on, undeterred by any questioning glances they receive. People started doing that after they’ve passed their third stairway, so she knows that they must be getting close to something important.

Looking at her father’s straight back, Sarada wants to ask him how he does it, but this is not the place or time.

And actually, now that she stops along with him in the middle of a random passage, something tells her that she was a little too hasty in her silent affirmations.

“What is it?” Her whisper seems to echo in the empty space and she winces at the volume.

The brown haired man in the front turns to face her with a blank face that serves as a reminder of who hides behind that henge.

“I have no clue where we are.”

Sarada unthinkingly slaps her forehead, before she sighs and fixes her eyes in the distance, hoping to catch the end of the tunnel, but it’s still far away.

“We might as well go to the end since we’re here.” She proposes and starts walking again. “I didn’t see any stairs on this level.”

“Me neither.” Her father agrees. “It must be the last.”

Sarada isn’t sure if she is relieved or unsettled when she realizes that they are at the foot of the mountain, under tons of solid rock. The torches on the wall flicker and paint their dreary surroundings in a threatening veil of shadows.

The tunnel gives out into a large room, with an arched roof and smooth walls. Sarada expected a gathering place for the terrorists to theorize their evil plans, but instead they find a room full of equipment that can only belong in a laboratory. And right through the middle of it, a large body of water flows from one end of the room to the other.

Sarada has visited Konoha’s research and development center before, and she’s also been to the hospital with her mother, so she’s seen some of the devices placed on the tables.

“Industrial machinery.” Her father murmurs, leaning over one such a specimen. A small snake – their sentinel for the night, it seems – slithers away from him and back to the entrance.

Industrial machinery might explain the size of them. It also makes much more sense, seeing how the terrorists made all that poison to kill a whole _continent_ with _._

Sarada only takes a minimal look at the room as a whole before concluding.

“This is the river where they dumped the poison in.”

Her father nods approvingly. “Yes,” his eyes narrow, “this must be one of the central streams that divide into branches later on.”

It is common sense and geography that rivers usually stem from mountains, but Sarada cannot imagine the effort it took to locate what is maybe the root to many of the smaller rivers that flow until they hit the other side of the continent. It’s seems like a play of luck, but maybe there is a science behind it that she doesn’t understand.

“How could they even find this place?”

Sasuke is silent for a few seconds before he steps closer to the deep blue water.

“The only possibility I see is that this was a thoroughly premeditated attack. They knew what they were doing, and they spent a large amount of time and resources to find this place and build it. I would be impressed at their dedication under any other circumstances.”

Sarada has a nagging feeling that mama wouldn’t be so impressed, but rather angry that they are wasting time and not looking for an antidote. Mind set on that fact, she skips around the room, skimming with a critical eye over the various devices.

“We need to hurry up, Sarada.” Her father takes a watch out of his cloak and checks the time with a grim line to his mouth. “There’s about three hours left before your mother gets here.” Sarada opens her mouth to say that that’s plenty, but then he adds. “At most.”

She doesn’t dare doubt that her mother can get here in half the time papa proposed to her, but they need to account for Tamanegi as well, and the boy’s stamina is barely bigger than Sarada’s. Which means that it will slow her mother down considerably, but not very much.

“Right.”

She tries to search harder, but it’s pretty hard when you don’t really know what you’re looking for. There are so many vials, each colored differently and with various amounts of liquid inside. Some even hold more than one color, and Sarada’s eyes almost cross at the unsettling sight.

Her father, on the other hand, sits on the ground with a scroll unfurled in front of him and paints some kind of seal on the blank paper. He doesn’t seem inclined to help her yet, but maybe Sarada is exaggerating and he has a good plan.

At least better than infiltrating in the hideout of their enemies, though that is going extremely well at the moment.

Brows furrowed, the young girl sets about gingerly lifting each vial of substance in front of her eyes. She tries her best to make a mental list of possible antidote containers, so that they will know what they should gather after her father is done with his seal.

Sasuke completes his work quickly, despite Sarada’s doubts. The result reveals a storage seal, which at another glance makes sense and then he starts inspecting the tables on the other side of the room.

“Place whatever you think it’s useful on the seal.”

Sarada doesn’t hesitate to do so, though her notion of useful might be slightly skewered from her father’s because she grabs almost every vial in view and dumps them on the seal. Papa only selects a few to bring back.

Even with their incredible strategy – at least dubbed as such inside Sarada’s mind – it still takes them the better part of two hours to really comb through everything. When they first entered, the number of tables didn’t seem so big, but once they set about the large room and discovered innumerable hidden containers, Sarada realized that her father was right to be in a hurry.

It feels like forever, digging through vats and hidden drawers, extracting various strange substances, scrolls and papers. At first, she tried combing through them to maybe select the few she deemed pertinent, but after a while it became a grating task and she couldn’t concentrate so Sarada simply started dumping whatever documents she found along with the vials.

It’s not like the seal is unable to store an inordinate amount of stuff. And if it didn’t, they could always make another one.

It was around the mark of one hour left when her father jumps from the other side of the bank and proceeds to store the last of the things he stole and furls the scroll back up. He rests his mismatched gaze on Sarada, who leans against the cool rock wall of the cave with a tired groan.

“We should be going back.”

About five seconds after he mutters that suggestion, shouts start echoing through the access hallway and Sarada, in the midst of standing up, freezes. Her gaze flies to her father and, in the same moment, the snake he summoned flies back to his master’s side, hissing and spitting things Sarada can’t understand.

Thundering footsteps mark their only exit blocked and Sarada quickly stumbles to her father’s side. The river spits and wheezes behind them as the water comes crashing at a very high speed while on the other side, many _many_ foes are filtering from the hallway, armed to the teeth and with vicious scowls twisting their lips upwards.

“You almost did it.” One man in the front snarls, brandishing his sword in front of his face. His expression darkens with unrestrained glee that makes Sarada’s skin crawl. “Almost.”

The word is like a gong announcing the start of the fight.

“Sarada, whatever you do don’t fall in the water or get hurt.” Her father orders quickly, taking his sword out of its sheath in one fluid motion.

Sarada all but balks, because considering the number of enemies, it won’t be an easy fight. But she promises nonetheless and jumps to the side, away from her father. A kunai slips into her cold palm and her sharingan flares to life in her eyes, startling her first few opponents long enough to grant her a couple of free strikes before they recover and earnestly attack.

And they are good.

Some of the missing nin prove a bigger challenge than the mercenaries, mostly because the former are a lot more strategical and organized than their fellow criminals, but it isn’t long before Sarada feels the first waves of fatigue slip through her mental shields.

As much as she is filled with adrenaline, there is the undeniable fact that Sarada is fighting for her life after a day of continuous running and a rather tasking clandestine flight to the criminals’ HQ. And the closer the morning gets, the more her body fails to comply with the necessary movements to deflect, avoid and counterattack.

She downs thirty opponents before one manages to catch her off guard.

A tight scream escapes her as she stumbles a little from the blade that cut a horizontal slash on her back. Sarada bites her lip and swings her leg, catching her attacker in a chakra enhanced kick that sends the man into the water with a loud splash.

But more gather around her, closing into a tight circle. She chances a quick glance at her father and finds him cutting down a crowd almost double in number than hers. His face is pulled into a worried frown, but he is concentrated on his opponents. Sarada sees no chance to call for back up, and even if they did manage to combine forces, her chakra is dwindling rapidly.

Her eyes widen when a thought enters through her mind and she swears as she dodges another attack. How could she be so stupid to forget that just a scant few days ago she just gathered two serious allies that can always be called on for backup?

Sarada calls up on the excuse that the notion is still very fresh in her mind, even as she quickly bites her thumb, makes the hand signs and slams her palm on the ground with a shout.

The smoke clears to reveal two large snakes towering over her and the crowd of enemies, who collectively take half a step back before realizing what just happened. Some of them surprisingly bare their teeth and use their own summoning technique in short order.

“Man, this is a mess!” Inda exclaims with a hiss as he rears his head back to take in the room at large.

“Sarada-sama,” Anda calmly greets, eyes slanting a bit on the men and women gathered below.

“Nii-san, look! That’s a damn _rat_!” Inda bares his fangs. “And that’s an owl- wait!” The snake squints, which takes Sarada a little aback since she didn’t expect snakes to be short sighted. “Is that a crab!?”

Completely ignoring his outspoken little brother, Anda inclines his head towards her, unmindful of the snarling summons and their equally terrifying masters.

“Your orders, Sarada-sama?”

Sarada thinks that it should be obvious, but she understands enough about Anda at the moment to know that he is a stickler to etiquette, unlike his brother.

“A little help, please.” Sarada gestures to the tight circle of violence gathered around them. Her face pulls into a grimace and her knees suddenly shake. “I’m not feeling that good.”

The sword that cut her must have obviously been poisoned, though it seems her mother’s master remedy is keeping it at bay for now. Sarada isn’t quite sure how much longer it will be able to do that, unfortunately. She’s quickly becoming more and more tired and her arms and legs don’t necessarily want to cooperate with her at the moment.

Seeing the dire state she is in, Anda nods gravely. Inda smacks his lips in a decidedly human habit that has her startling.

“Dinner!” He announces and the two snakes lounge.

Sarada grits her teeth as a burning starts around her wound, but she picks up a handful of shuriken that she throws with deadly accuracy before taking out another kunai and keeping her ground. Whoever comes at her gets cut down, but she makes no effort to extend her reach further than the small circle she’s set for herself.

Anda and Inda make short work of the summoned animals, though the crab does give them more work than the others. Sarada resolutely averts her gaze when the rat and the owl are swallowed in short order.

The clamor increases as more shouts start on the enemy lines.

Her father takes his cue from her and summons Aoda, which brings Inda an inordinate amount of pleasure, while his brother remains as respectful and systematic as usual.

“Sasuke-sama, Sarada-sama seems to be hurt.” Aoda dutifully reports over his younger son’s excited squabbling.

Sasuke grits his teeth until his jaw hurts. “I know, Aoda. Let’s get this over with already.”

It takes an arduous long time to dispose of the last of the enemies. By now, they stopped appearing through the entrance hallway, though Sarada has a nagging feeling that an ambush squad is all set for them the moment they will try to escape.

Her father grunts as the last enemy is cut down by his sword. He waves it towards the ground, getting rid of the excess of blood and re-sheathes it.

He’s at her side in an instant, gently prodding around the wound. Sarada hisses in pain.

Papa frowns.

“This is not good.” His words do nothing but alarm her further. It seems that he realizes his mistake as well because he shakes his head and gets out a roll of gauze. His eyes bore into hers and he warns with a handful of water. “This is going to hurt a lot.”

Sarada can’t quite stifle her curses when the cold water hits her tender wound. “ _Shanaro_ , damn it!”

Aoda curiously inclines his head as he observes the proceedings.

“Sarada-sama seems to be very spirited.” Anda remarks to his father, who nods in a serious manner.

“Indeed. She and her friends were a very spirited bunch the first time we met as well.”

Sarada resolutely ignores their gossiping and spits through her gritted teeth.

“Papa are you sure the water is fine? What if it’s poisoned?”

“They dump the poison from here and the water flows pretty fast. I doubt there’s any leftover poison in the water and I’m going to take my chances anyway since your wound is already full of poison.”

A small whine tumbles from her lips but mercifully, her father finishes tying her bandages. She sinks against him for a long moment before Sarada places one hand on the ground and tries to sit up.

Papa grabs her arm and helps her up. He looks at Aoda, mouth open and an order on the tip of his tongue when the mountain begins to shake. It seems that in the heat of battle, they forgot to check the time. When her father takes a look, the corners of his mouth fall in a grim rendition of a smile. Sarada wants to crawl in a corner and cry at the unfairness of it all.

“Can’t you contact mama?” She says, her tone more accusing than she wants.

Unfortunately, her papa seems to not have taken into consideration such a thing because he shakes his head. Rocks fall from the ceiling in a shower of dust. Someone inside the room groans.

“It would take too long for a summon to get to her.”

“Should we try to get up there?” Even before she asks, Sarada has an inkling that it won’t be a good idea.

Papa closes his eyes as he thinks. “No, it’s too risky. To destroy the mountain, your mother must be following a very complicated and detailed strategy and there’s no time to stop her. I assured her that we’ll get out well before they arrive.”

“Which was a lie!” Inda says a little too joyfully, burping a few feathers after the fact.

Sarada stifles a painful snort of laughter over her father’s glare.

“Whatever the case, we need a new plan of escape.” Aoda looks from father to daughter and back again.

Anda quietly slithers around while the cave shakes violently around them.

“I don’t think we have a lot of time left to make one.” Sarada eyes the ceiling doubtfully.

As if to prove her right, a large chunk of rock falls to the ground. Another one quickly follows, falling into the river and splashing water on the bloodied banks.

Sarada’s face twists at the amplified gore of the sight.

Papa paces back and forth. He makes to turn to the entrance hallway, but just then the opening caves in and they are properly stuck here. He emits something close to a growl.

Sarada looks up and around. Anda and Aoda seem tense as they wait for their masters to decide on a plan and they even venture a few possibilities of their own. On the other side of the spectrum, Inda is decidedly screwing around and not helping.

“Maybe we should reverse teleport with Sasuke-sama and Sarada-sama.” Anda proposes.

“It would take a lot of chakra and we also need someone to summon us in Ryūchi Cave.” Aoda refutes the idea gently.

“We should try to make our way through!” Inda shimmies between two fallen boulders. “Or maybe if we shout loud enough, Sakura-sama might hear us!”

“That is entirely impossible and stupid.”

Sarada chokes at the unexpected words coming from maybe the most polite summon she’s ever encountered.

But Inda does not seem deterred by his father’s harsh words.

“We can try to swim to the other side!”

Aoda’s mouth is already open to refuse but her father talks before the snake can.

“That might work.” He glances to Aoda questioningly. “Can you do it?”

Aoda hums as the cave continues to fall around them. He exchanges a considering look with Anda. Inda is all but jumping in place at the notion.

“We may be able to accomplish that,” Aoda says, calculating, and Sarada’s chest fills with unbridled relief, “though we are no water snakes. The ride will be bumpy.”

Her father nods somberly. The walls shake the worst yet and a deep vibration shoots through the floor. Sarada loses her equilibrium for a short second.

Papa’s mouth is open but then Aoda dunks his head and swallows him whole. Sarada’s mind has no time to dissect that fact because a strong jaw closes around her in turn and she falls back into a dark, slimy space with a moving _thing_ that all but makes her shriek.

She breathes through her nose and it takes her another minute to properly realize that she’s in one of her summons’ mouth and the thing that moves is their tongue.

“Man, that’s not fair Anda! I wanted to carry Sarada-chan!”

Inda’s voice filters strangely, as if travelling through water from very far away. Without meaning to, Sarada sighs with a small amount of relief. So she’s in Anda’s mouth. The space she’s in tilts in time with the snake’s movements and Sarada fights hard to keep her place and not slide around, but it is a little hard to do that when there is only slime and no place to hang onto.

She resigns herself to slide around until her side hits something. At another touch, it’s something less slimy and with a hard surface. The body curves upwards and becomes smaller so Sarada’s mind triumphantly shouts that it is a tooth.

Trying her best not to cut herself on it and poison her body further, Sarada carefully drapes her hands around it and tries to stay put until the nightmare is over. She closes her eyes because it’s stupid to keep trying to see through the encroaching darkness, but then she’s struggling to stay awake, aware that it will be very bad if she falls asleep now with all the poison coursing through her.

She feels her skin burning and Sarada is suddenly very hot inside Anda’s mouth, but she relocates that to the poison. Her tired brain complains that it would have been easier to get swallowed along with her papa, but Sarada counters that there was no time for that and resolutely lists every common plant she was taught to use against poison. She is unsure if mama will be there when they get to the surface, but in the worst case that she isn’t, Sarada needs to have a backup plan to fall onto.

Her father’s knowledge of treating poisons is probably spotty, or maybe she’s just underestimating him, but the first thing they teach you in the Academy is that you need to fend for yourself first and foremost, and not fall on anyone’s help until you really can’t manage anymore. So Sarada keeps herself awake while planning what to do first and foremost when they reach the surface.

Time is a spotty thing inside Anda’s mouth, but at some point when Sarada’s arms are just about to give out, the place shakes. She stifles a groan as the world tilts downwards. Covered in a thick coat of saliva, Sarada is expelled from Anda’s mouth without much preamble.

Her father is there to catch her, even as the distance from the ground is basically null. He places her gently on the grass, his own hair matted to his face because of Aoda’s saliva. It makes for an amusing sight, but Sarada can only groan and grunt at the moment.

“She’s worse.”

Her father should really work on his encouraging phrases.

His hands turn her on her side and Sarada presses her hot skin against the cool grass with immense relief.

“I only have this universal antidote from your mother, but it’s weaker than what she gave you earlier.”

Sarada notices that there is light wherever they are now. She also reminds herself that there was something she must be doing, but she can’t remember what exactly right now. Something stabs her arm, but she is far past caring at this point.

“Stay with her.” She hears papa order sternly and hears the grass shift as he gets to his feet. “I’m going to search for some useful plants in this forest.”

Suddenly realizing what her muddled mind was missing, Sarada wrestles with her body and tries to face her father. She fails miserably.

“Plants… that one…” She is partly aware that she is mumbling like a fool, but the images of the right plants filter through her mind rapidly, yet her mouth cannot form the words.

A warm hand settles on her forehead. “You will be alright, Sarada. I promise. Just don’t fall asleep, please.” Her father’s voice shakes slightly, and it gives her enough energy to keep her thoughts reeling and her eyes open. She’s never heard papa so frightened before that he is downright panicking.

Footsteps fade away, hurriedly making their way into the forest.

Inda’s head comes closer to her and his forked tongue reaches out to touch her. Sarada shivers at the contact, but she makes no sound because she can’t anymore.

“Yo, guys! Sara-chan doesn’t seem too good.”

“Anyone can see that, Inda.” Anda says patiently.

Aoda looks around, the slits in his eyes expanding and contracting as he watches out for any attack. In the distance, the mountain crumbles and the ground shakes, rattling her bones.

Sarada bites her lip until it bleeds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry i'm late  
> on another note - rip to poor sarada


	10. Day 20

* * *

**_Sarada's tip:_ ** _Always bring basic, all-purpose medicine with you on your travels._

_But if you don't - Uchiha Sakura is more than enough to bring any poison to its metaphorical knees._

* * *

Despite the most logical conclusion that dictates a detailed strategy is important in order to destroy a whole damn mountain, Sakura resolutely swats that plan away.

It is unimportant in the grand scheme of things and a waste of time to have a strategy when her daughter and her husband are infiltrating the enemy base without any backup. Her mind is too preoccupied with the infinite amounts of bad things that can happen that she simply cannot concentrate on a plan.

They get there with time to spare, but that was possible with lady Katsuyu’s help. Sakura summoned two small snails on the way, one to keep Tamanegi’s battery plugged into a power source and one for her to act as said power source.

Tamanegi promptly sits on the ground when they arrive at their destination, spent. Sakura gives the innocent mountain the stink eye. Somewhere up there – or down there – her stupid husband follows his stupid plan and drags her daughter along with him. Oh, she will have words with _lovely Sasuke-kun_ when this is over.

“What will we do now, mama?” The tired boy on the ground tilts his head in her direction.

Sakura worries her lower lip thoughtfully, hands on her hips. She glowers at the mountain, inwardly urging it to catch fire and die. But that won’t happen until she gets to work.

“Tamanegi, you scout out the forest around the mountain.” Sakura orders, gaze never straying from the rock giant. “Be sure to not get too close but keep an eye out for Sarada and Sasuke-kun. We have to find them fast and I need confirmation that they are alive. Contact me through lady Katsuyu periodically.”

Tamanegi nods resolutely, a serious frown playing on his face and jumps away in the next minute.

Sakura checks her watch – five minutes until showtime. Something in her gut rebels, but she attributes it to nerves because she _won’t_ go down that road. Her family has to have managed to get out of there in one piece and now she needs to complete the deed and they can all go home.

When the time comes, Sakura first applies a hard hit at the base of the mountain, feeling for empty spaces. She finds many – very, very many. Which means that this will be easy because the structure might be hard, but with so much empty space and voids, the outer walls will be easier to crumble and destroy.

Despite Sasuke’s resolute belief that his wife is following a complicated strategy to destroy the hideout, Sakura is actually running along the mountain, up and down, placing – dare she say – _strategic_ hits and kicks. At some point she activates her seal for a bigger kick of chakra behind her enhanced punch. It proves a very good edge because the mountain all but groans in response.

Rocks tumble to the ground, dust falls, trees splinter and launch wood shrapnel in all directions. Sakura wastes no time as she hits wherever she finds a weaker spot.

Birds fly, animals scutter away from their falling home.

Sakura’s jaw is clenched so hard it hurts. Her chest constricts the longer lady Katsuyu remains silent, but she resolutely stays on Sasuke’s orders.

Another ten minutes pass before Tamanegi contacts her.

“I found Sarada, but she’s not well. I’ve been informed that she’s been poisoned, and that Sasuke-san is searching for some plant remedies in the forest.”

All at once, Sakura feels her world start to collapse along with her target.

“Didn’t the antidote work?!” Sakura asks for the sake of asking. If Sarada is unwell, then it obviously didn’t.

“Apparently it wasn’t enough.” Tamanegi’s voice is tight. “Her lips are blue.” He’s mumbling distractedly and he’s surely not aware of it.

“Where are you, Tamanegi?”

“Southeast, in a clearing by a river.”

“I will direct you, Sakura-chan.” Lady Katsuyu reassures mildly.

Directing all her anger into a tight ball, Sakura points it towards the mountain. Her fist curls and tightens until her palm bleeds and her muscles strain. She hits the remains of the rockface with a loud yell of “ _Shanaro_!” that echoes all around her and gets lost in the sound of the destruction.

Sakura doesn’t stay to see it fall. She runs as fast as humanly possible, following lady Katsuyu’s directions and Tamanegi’s earlier words.

It takes her long – _too long_. Longer than it should.

Her heart beats out of her chest, she can’t breathe and her legs weight a thousand tons. Sakura finds them through the apocalyptic landscape, nestled next to the blue waters of a flowing river.

Sarada is lying on the grassy riverbank, unmoving and bandaged around the middle.

Around her, three snake summons form a safety circle. Tamanegi sits next to her and his lips are moving. The boy is probably trying to keep her up. Sasuke is at their side, pressing whatever remedies he found. His shoulders are tight, and this is what finally breaks Sakura.

She crumbles without sound and safely shocks her husband and the young boy on the other side of Sarada. Sakura’s hands touch everywhere she can – she feels her daughter’s sluggish pulse, inspects her dilating pupils, grips her cold hands and covers her burning forehead with her palm.

Sakura violently reaches for her pouch and throws it at her husband.

“Find the green vial with a red top!”

Sasuke upturns the contents of her bag and searches desperately for what she asked.

Sakura gently pries the bandages off her daughter. A hiss escapes her at the sight of the mangled flesh, angry and red with black spots of poison.

Sarada whimpers, but it’s a good thing. Sakura’s mind takes in the sight of the wound and whispers that she doesn’t have long.

Healing chakra flows through her hands and she presses them, ignoring her daughters pained gasp.

“Keep her down!”

Tamanegi all but drapes over the girl to do as Sakura ordered. Sarada trashes with unnatural power, but that’s just adrenaline and survival instinct that makes her more powerful than she should under these circumstances.

Sasuke finally finds what she needed him to. Sakura plucks it with a hand, takes off the top with her teeth and jabs the needle in Sarada’s side. She spares a glance at the plants he gathered and offers a nod in approval.

“Make a thick paste out of those.”

Her husband hurries to comply.

“Shit, that looks really, really bad.” Indra’s voice comes from far away for Sakura. She is aware of three snake bodies slithering over the ground, but she affords them no attention as she once more presses her hands over her daughter’s wound.

“Tamanegi, reach over for that container, take one pill and make her swallow it.”

The boy throws her a doubtful look, no doubt discouraged that he can’t even make Sarada stay put. He’s uncertain about his chances of success of his new mission, but he forwards no complaint as he reaches for the pill container.

Sasuke finally finishes making the paste. Sakura scoops it with her hand and splatters it all over Sarada’s wound. Her daughter’s hiss is interrupted by Tamanegi placing the pill in her mouth and then he’s muttering something in her ear as he keeps her mouth shut with one hand.

“Sakura, what do you need me to do next?”

There is a burning agony and despair in her husband’s gaze. His fingers are twitching, trying to find something to do, to _help._ Sakura tries to find him an occupation, but she’s pretty much done for the moment.

“Make sure there are no enemies trying to get the jump on us. Sarada is stable for now.”

He nods tightly and stands up, stalking to the edge of the clearing with a clipped “Aoda.”

Sakura leans back on her haunches once the whole paste is spread over Sarada’s wound. She exhales the breath she’s been holding ever since Tamanegi informed her of her daughter’s condition.

A glance at the sky signals the approach of midday. Birds fly in flocks over their former home. The dust has settled somewhat, but Sakura still hears landslides somewhere in the near distance.

Placing a hand on Tamanegi’s shoulder, Sakura offers the boy a small smile and sits up.

“Please stay with Sarada.”

She finds her husband at the edge of the clearing, tense as a spring. Aoda is coiled around him, towering over the forest and probably scouting out the vicinity at Sasuke’s request. Sensing her approach, the great snake moves his tail so Sakura can draw up next to Sasuke.

She remains decidedly silent until Sasuke asks.

“How is she?”

If she was anyone but the woman who has loved him all this time, she wouldn’t have caught the slight crack in his tone. She slips her clammy hand into his and squeezes.

“She will be alright.” Sakura hurries to reassure. “The poison was much more potent than what I encountered in the past, but that’s to be expected.” She sighs tiredly and reaches with her other hand to rub at her temples. “The mastermind behind this is certainly well versed in rare and very powerful poisons.”

Sasuke’s gaze falls to the ground at their feet and his mouth thins.

“The guys we fought were only cannon fodder. I can’t see any of them skilled enough to devise that kind of poison. And yet they used it on their weapons.” He squeezes his eyes shut and Sakura gets a glimpse of the self-reproach he’s always hiding so well. “I shouldn’t have let Sarada fight in the first place.”

Sakura hums. “I kind of doubt you could have stopped her _and_ fought those guys at the same time.”

Her humor offers a slight reprieve from the grim situation.

“What exactly happened, Sasuke-kun?”

Her husband tells her in the briefest, yet most detailed terms how they arrived at the secret hideout, their journey to the bottom of the mountain and what they found in the largest room there.

The explanation perturbs Sakura greatly, especially because what he describes is, essentially, a whole next generation laboratory with impressive features. But she can’t express an opinion because Sasuke is pretty lost when it comes to thoroughly describing the devices they found there and the general terms he uses are unhelpful. Still, Sakura knows one thing for sure.

“I think that they only used that place to dilute the poison and dump it in the water.” She munches on her lower lip thoughtfully. “It’s possible that it is made in another location altogether.”

Her husband nods in agreement.

“How did you get out of there?”

This time the explanation is peppered with interferences from Aoda. Sakura is impressed to hear about the snakes’ feat, and she makes a mental note to thank Anda and Inda for keeping Sarada safe.

“We should contact Sai soon.” Sasuke advises and Sakura nods resolutely.

She glances down at her watch and notices that an hour has passed.

“Come help me please.” She tugs on his hand and they return to their daughter’s side.

Inda raises his head from where it rested on the ground next to Sarada’s body.

“Yo, Sakura-sama,” the snake’s tone is slightly accusing, and it fills Sakura with amusement, “why is she still looking bad?”

Anda coaxes his brother away from her path with a scolding look, but Sakura only smiles indulgently and explains.

“Sarada looks bad because the poison is still in her system and her body has been battling to isolate it.”

“Huh.”

“You didn’t get much out of it did you, little brother?” Anda inquires with a small dram of exasperation.

Inda huffs, which is a strange sound coming from a snake, but does not answer.

“You will see.” Sakura assures and glances to Tamanegi and Sasuke. “Please hold her down carefully. I will extract the poison now.”

Sakura uses a little water to liquify the solidified plant paste until it is steadily dripping down her daughter’s back and onto the ground. Then she raises on chakra infused hand and applies it over the paste, drawing a bubble-like sphere. She creates a small vortex inside by applying chakra in circular movements and the resulting current sucks out the poison from the wound.

It interrupts Sarada’s sleep and causes her to scream, but Sakura cannot fault her for that. She is well aware that it is an extremely painful process. The lumpy poison particles drift to the other end of the bubble and remain suspended until Sakura is sure that all of it is extracted. She dumps the whole thing on a storage seal so she can analyse it later, then returns to close the angry red wound in her daughter’s back.

Sarada will remain feverish for the rest of the day, but Sakura is now certain that she will be alright and make a full recuperation.

“Maybe we should send her to stay in Kagerou Village-“

Sakura laughs, the sound biting. “There is absolutely no way that she will agree to that, Sasuke-kun.”

Sasuke frowns. “Well she doesn’t need to.”

“Are you going to leave your daughter in a random hotel room and book it out of there then?” Sakura’s eyes narrow, though her tone is playful.

Her husband drags his hand over his face, leaving behind a defeated expression.

“And I also refuse to play bodyguard.” Tamanegi adds fuel to the fire. The boy crosses his arms, black eyes bleeding red at the edges. “All I’ve been doing is run around and do nothing.”

“Well we know whose fault that is.” Sakura’s glare is full of meaning.

Sasuke gets the message that he’s not off the hook yet, not that he doubted that his wife will just overlook the fact that he left her behind and proceeded with a halfway thought out plan. That ended up a step away from complete disaster, but Sasuke doesn’t need a reminder of that. So he grudgingly agrees, even though there was no need of an answer from him.

“Fine.”

But at least he can feel better for a short minute.

* * *

It turns out that Sai thought of them first.

Sakura receives the messenger bird with an open scroll. The characters melt onto the paper as artistically as any of her friend’s paintings.

Sasuke walks up to where she’s standing in the middle of the clearing. Aoda and his sons have been dismissed for the moment and Tamanegi was tasked with building a fire.

The afternoon is quickly dwindling into a colourful twilight and yet Sarada remains asleep, though her fever has gone down considerably. Sakura estimates that she should wake up sometime before tomorrow morning and, to Sasuke’s immense relief, she reported that there are no secondary effects or consequences from the poison’s actions.

“What does it say?”

His wife frowns at the scroll as if it personally offended her. And maybe that bastard Sai did say something again because he’s talented like that. Sasuke cannot deny that it brings him a measure of righteous gratification whenever Sakura kicks his ass for his thoughtless words.

“Something wrong?”

“No,” Sakura shakes her head, not even mentioning the appearance of her least favorite nickname, “I was surprised by what he wrote. He says – ‘A level five state of alert was declared through the five nations.’” Interesting since a level seven usually meant the moon falling on them. “’Several ANBU teams approached as previously planned. We were surprised by the number of hideouts discovered and the equipment within. All targets have been eliminated. Team six managed to extract critical information regarding the real headquarters of the mastermind behind all of this. Under this message you have disclosed the coordinates. ETA for the beginning of the assault is tomorrow strike midnight. Meeting point will be two kilometres west of the target.’”

Sakura exhales as she furls the scroll back up. Sasuke thinks long and hard about their options.

“Sarada will not be in the best condition, but I’m sure she will manage.”

Sasuke grunts, something of his earlier uncertainness slipping through.

“Sasuke-kun, I won’t leave her behind. And I certainly won’t leave _both_ kids _here_. We’re going together.” She forwards a sweet smile that he hates to admit is always going to make his resolve crumble. “And besides, there will be a lot of ANBU agents there. I doubt that the kids will be needed that much. They can hang on the backlines.”

“I’m sure that will happen.” Sasuke drawls derisively, already knowing when he is beat. “Exactly like you said.”

His wife swats at his arm and Sasuke masks his wince with a kiss to her hair.

“The place is close. Five hours at most.”

Sakura reaches out and cups his cheek. Her eyes glimmer. “Then we have all the time to let Sarada recuperate.”

Her hand glows green and Sasuke feels the small cut on his cheek close up with a small tingle.

“Don’t mind me, Sa-“

“Stop talking and let me heal you.” Her voice may be soft but there is the undercurrent of a threat that Sasuke easily recognizes. His mouth twitches in the beginnings of a smile. He knows to pick his battles by now.

* * *

Sarada cracks an eye open and stifles a groan. Her whole body isn’t on fire anymore, but there is a pulsing, dull ache deep inside her bones that makes her warier of her current state than any awful pain would.

When her vision clears, she finds a violet sky with dark blue streaks and glinting stars.

“You’re not dead.”

Tamanegi’s tone is light and slightly teasing. Sarada scoffs and tries to move her unresponsive muscles into another position.

“There’s nothing I wanted more than to hear your voice first thing when I woke up.”

Her voice cracks and her throat feels like sandpaper. Tamanegi thrusts a water canteen in her face.

“I’m sure.”

“Where’s mama and papa?”

“Mama is asleep. Sasuke-san went to get more twigs for the fire.”

Sarada spots her mother a few feet away, confirming Tamanegi’s theory.

“What’s going on?”

“Besides you almost dying?”

Huh, Tamanegi seems to be in good spirits if he keeps joking. Sarada wonders what brought that about. “Mama just finished making an antidote for the poison she found in your system. And a message arrived from Sai-san.”

This piques Sarada’s interest. She turns her head, silently urging him to continue.

“They discovered the main headquarters where the mastermind supposedly is.” The boy explains with a drawl. “There will be a collective attack tomorrow night.”

Sarada all but jumps to her feet at the news. But she stops short when her body all but gives out from under her. Her vision swims for an unsettlingly long amount of time before she regains enough composure to ask.

“When are we leaving?”

“Sometime tomorrow.” Tamanegi sighs and leans back.

Sarada allows a grimace to light her face before the boy returns with another canteen, filled with a rosy liquid.

“Mama said to drink this. And I suggest you get as must rest as you can. That is, if you want to be useful tomorrow.”

Sarada’s expression falls into a glare even though his words ring true. Tamanegi does not seem to mind the animosity.

“You are unusually chipper.”

A slim white eyebrow lifts with clear disdain.

“Well since you hogged all the fun until now, I suppose that I am looking forward to tomorrow.” He crosses his arms over his chest. This time he awards her with his own glare. “They kept debating whether they should leave you behind.”

Something in Sarada’s chest squeezes. She supposes that the poison did something to her heart.

“Why the hell would they want to leave me in the middle of the forest?” She asks calmly.

Tamanegi huffs. “You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t.”

The glare on her deepens. “In Kagerou Village. I absolutely refused to stay back and guard your sorry ass.”

“Thank Lord.”

“Why should I miss all the action just because you are an idiot?”

The question is rhetorical, but it irks Sarada the wrong way.

“Shut the hell up!” Her whisper is harsh. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. _You_ couldn’t have dodged that either.”

“I guess we’ll never know.” There is a strange glint in Tamanegi’s eyes now.

Sarada is tempted to unleash her sharingan, but she resolves to not waste any of her precious chakra on him. Mama and papa might have entertained the notion, but they wouldn’t leave Sarada in the middle of nowhere with literally no supervision. She’s sure that they know what to expect in that case.

No, Sarada will be taken along, but she also needs to show them that she is better and that she can handle whatever fight they are thrown into.

Because if there is one thing she is sure of, it is that she will not back out of any fight, no matter how half-dead she is. But her parents also do not deserve to needlessly worry about her well-being.

Her mind set, Sarada downs the water in the bottle and then leans down and tries to find a more comfortable position in her sleeping bag under Tamanegi’s surprised gaze.

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?” Sarada squeezes her eyes shut. “Sleeping like my life depends on it.”

* * *

DAY 21

Mama carries her the next morning, mostly because Sarada is still sore and recuperating. She swallows her pride and convinces herself that if she listens to her mother, she won’t have to argue too much with her when the time to fight comes.

Sarada keeps her eyes open, watching carefully as their surroundings slowly melt into pine forests and even higher mountains. There are many waterfalls in this land, much more than there were in the land of Mountains. The smell is also different – more acute and tickling her nostrils. The crisp air makes her breath turn into vapor and she shivers into her coat.

Incredibly, it seems that the land of Mountain Streams is a lot colder than its neighbouring country. The altitude has also changed and the rivers that were so prevalent in the other country turned to little streams, gurgling over the sound of the chirping birds and rustling leaves.

Sarada inhales, the strange air a novelty she never encountered even on Konoha’s highest mountains.

But, she thinks as she gets a small glimpse of the horizon, Konoha’s mountains are definitely smaller.

“Tamanegi,” papa’s voice brings her out of her reverie. Sarada glances to the front of the group where said boy is.

“Nothing.” He reports, looking left and right.

Her father grunts.

“You should take a break, Tamanegi-kun.” Mama advises as they continue their ascension up the mountain. It turns out that pine trees are not useful travel routes because of their thin branches and sharp green needles. “You too, Sasuke-kun.”

Papa answer is something indecisive but Sarada sees him subtly trying to take one last sweeping glance with his doujutsu. She hides a smile in the thick material of her mother’s coat and continues to watch the scenery pass by.

The light is fading fast when they get to the designated coordinates. The sun has long since disappeared behind a curtain of clouds, making the temperature instantly drop several degrees.

Their ascension brought them to a wide plateau with only shrubbery and small pine trees and a path that, _again_ , only her father seems to know, brings them into an abandoned village lost I the forest, peppered with stone huts and no rooftops. There are hairy dogs with wiggling tails and sharp teeth that guard the group of abandoned dwellings.

One look from her mother has them scattering and it’s right then that Sarada learns an interesting fact about her father.

He does not like dogs.

“But he does like cats.” Mama winks as she deposits Sarada on her feet.

The girl giggles, tucking the small secret beneath her heart.

“Through there.” Her father grabs Tamanegi by the scruff of his neck when the boy makes to step in the wrong direction.

Sarada watches with amusement as a confused Tamanegi is dragged into the deep recesses of a stone hut, not any different from any others they’ve seen down the street.

But this one is special, she finds when her steps bring her on top of a dark, moldy stairway. Torches are lit at small intervals, illuminating the way down.

The basement is a room devoid of anything but a rusty link chain that Sarada properly sidesteps and avoids looking at. Instead, she concentrates on the squad of ANBU already waiting for them. Sarada recognizes uncle Sai’s form through the dim lighting. His mask is off, and his face is set into stone.

“The attack will be coordinated.” He hands a scroll to her father. “We have the destruction of their hideout handled, but we need you to search the place while we distract them. This man is a well-connected black market broker. The Hokage asked for as much evidence as possible.”

Her father snorts softly but accepts the document without complaint. Mama draws up to his side and they both read the message from lord Seventh quietly for a while before mama nods with a tight smile at Sai.

“What about the antidote?” Sakura asks expectantly.

Uncle Sai shifts on his feet. The shadows on the walls dance strangely in the firelight.

“It is going slow, but Tsunade-sama is confident that the provisional formula she has designed will work until the real antidote can be properly pieced together.” Her uncle’s eyes draw from Sarada to Tamanegi and then back to her parents. “The team from Kiri is very close, but I feel like Tsunade-sama is starting to lose her patience with them.”

Against all odds, mama starts laughing.

“Yeah, I was expecting that. But it’s good that the provisional antidote works.”

Uncle Sai nods, though there is no change in his expression. “The number of deaths has dropped as a consequence.” He pauses then, takes one long look at her mother before starting again. “I guess you will get back in time to work on the antidote.”

Mama grins. “That’d be awesome.”

Uncle Sai’s face never wavers from its blank expression as he replaces his mask and disappears along with the rest of the ANBU in the room.

The suddenly empty spaces leave a trail of cold behind and Sarada crosses her arms and waits for her parents to say something.

“This is an important mission.” Papa steps closer to her and Tamanegi.

The boy scoffs and scuffles the ground with his foot. “As opposed to the importance of stopping the whole operation?”

“ _We_ will be stopping the whole operation.” Mama says with a smile at Tamanegi’s confused expression. “Anyone can destroy a building… or a mountain,” she exchanges an amused glance with her father. Sarada cannot help but smile too, “but the real target of this mission is finding as many things about these black market deals as possible. Then we will have lists of contacts, sums of money exchanged, lists of goods,” Sakura’s gaze softens on the two open mouthed kids. Her heart fills with the kind of warmth she wouldn’t have expected to feel in the middle of such a critical operation, but these two – and by extension, the rest of the Shin brothers – can make the human side of her overcome the shinobi, “so our job is as important as theirs.”

She finishes softly, feeling Sasuke’s curious gaze on her.

Sarada’s cheeks flood with warmth and she nods with an intense kind of determination that is so reminiscent of her father’s. Tamanegi takes one more moment to mull it over before he, too, nods in acquiescence.

Sasuke raises a brow, impressed if nothing else, though he knows first-hand that his wife could convince the most stubborn to do what she wants. His gaze flits to the dimly lit exit, his mind reflexively calculating the possibilities of what may happen until he makes a conscious effort to stop.

_Because_ , he thinks as his eyes rest on his daughter and a boy who holds the sharingan against all odds and fate, _there are enough unknown variables to render his calculations useless._

* * *

The hideout is hidden deep into a gorge filled with pine trees as tall as the valley. The cliff they hang onto bends over their crowns, offering a breathtaking view of the twilight and its palette of vibrant colors. Birds take to the skies with loud cries and the wind ruffles through the trees and creates a cacophony of fretful leaves that mask their footsteps expertly.

They advance upon the small chateau made of rock and wood that melts perfectly into the side of the rockface. It tells Sarada all that she needs to know about the businessman residing inside it. Who knows how many secret rooms and tunnels he has designed into his house so that it resembles a labyrinth more than a home?

The ANBU are already there, if the drops of blood on the road to the gate, at the gate and every ten meters or so are anything to go by. Paradoxically enough, there are no bodies left behind, but that is just one more thing to showcase the ANBU’s skills, no matter what hidden village they hail from. The fact that there are no alarms blaring yet is also a plus point for them.

Her father raises his hand when they are in sight of the entrance doors. He motions with his hand and they break into two groups. Sarada goes with her mother and Tamanegi keeps close with papa as they break through the windows and dart down opposite hallways.

The scroll uncle Sai gave her parents earlier also provided a sketchy map of their target and her parents decided that the best strategy would be to extend the reach of the search for maximum accuracy in this time sensitive situation.

Mama takes point and Sarada makes sure to keep her sharingan trained on any open doors and hallways. Her head periodically turns backward, scanning behind for any surprises.

Her mother bursts into the nearest library without any of the grace Sarada usually associates her with. Sakura is a book lover and respectful of other people’s works, but that does not mean she won’t protect the books while she destroys the room they are in.

Heaving mountains of pages flutter to the ground as her mother lifts the bookcases off the ground and throws them into a corner, clear of the middle of the room. Sarada keeps her eyes on the door while mama punches a hole into the floor large enough for them to slip through.

Sarada’s hands fly through the hand signs for katon and she shoots five small fireballs that dispel a long way from the ground but offer enough light for them to peek through.

“I think that’s it.” Mama grabs Sarada’s arm and they fall through together.

The ground is covered with dust and the air is heavy with humidity and stale enough to make her choke.

“What’s this?”

“The archive room. It was circled by Sai on the sketch.” Her mother punches through the nearest wooden bookcases and fashions a makeshift torch that Sarada lights up. The light flickers over her face, pulled into a grave expression as her eyes take in the sheer abundance of documents in the absurdly large room. “Let’s get to work.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello, yes i am alive and well  
> sorry for the break, graduation day and other real life stuff was going on
> 
> I did leave you with a little cliffhanger last chapter, which makes me feel a little bit evil and i like it
> 
> in other news - thank you for reading and i hope you enjoyed the chapter!


	11. Day 21

* * *

**_Sarada's tip:_ ** _Set realistic expectations for your kids._

_But even if you do - know that your kids will defy those expectations anyways._

* * *

It is usually Sasuke’s luck that he is the first to find trouble and, unbeknownst to him, he is mostly right.

Tamanegi is unusually tense while they run to the top of the building. They’ve already encountered three Suna ANBU and two from Kiri, but that’s only because they’ve shown themselves to the Uchiha.

They take three more stairways and two elevators that Sasuke properly despises before coming onto a ridiculously large hallway that is as big as the main boulevard in Konoha. From there, it is a matter of finding the right doorway, but Sai was diligent enough to mark the spot with a large X. Sasuke might grumble about the man in general, but at least he will grudgingly agree that he is a good shinobi.

Before anything else, Sasuke keeps Tamanegi back and checks with both the sharingan and the rinnegan, which is good because he finds at least one hundred men stuffed in Midohige’s office along with the man himself.

He only has time to mumble that it’s a full room before the walls behind them burst inwardly in a shower of dust and debris. Six figures step through – two men and four women, clothed in a uniform of sorts with long pants and short tops, which is as ridiculous as it sounds but Sasuke’s seen worse. Their sneering faces twist into delighted smiles at their small number of opponents.

Sasuke spots an ANBU draped over some fallen rocks and he figures that these six are not the run-of-the-mill bodyguards for the mafia boss. Their postures and the way they involuntarily angle their bodies in just the right way to deflect any incoming attack also speaks volumes. They might just be the masterminds behind the poison fiasco all along.

“Look here boys, we have Uchiha-“

“But weren’t there four, Red?” The one with the yellow cropped hair interrupts.

Red bites his tongue as his eyes dart around the space they created, but it’s the blue long haired woman who sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose.

“So we have Uchiha Sasuke, right?”

Sasuke does not enjoy her derisive tone right then.

“But weren’t we hunting _four_ Uchiha?” The yellow one asks again.

“There are only two here, _yow_!” There is one with black hair that is as irritating as his face is.

Sasuke’s hand closes around the hilt of his sword. They don’t even startle at the movement. Shinobi then, or possibly highly trained mercenaries.

Blue hair takes the lead again. “Then we split up! The most dangerous one is his wife. Red, Yellow, White and Black. Go and find them!”

With the woman’s bark, said enemies flash out of there to find Sakura and Sarada.

Something twisted and sadistic twists inside Sasuke’s chest and his smirk widens at the satisfying thought that his wife will wipe the floor with those losers as he brandishes his sword in front of him.

The blue haired woman scowls.

He spots Tamanegi summon his kusarigama from the seal on his wrist, twisting the chain around his hand. Sasuke wants to correct those tense shoulders, but then the green one gurgles a strange laugh and runs straight towards him.

Sasuke brings his sword up to deflect the incoming attack, but his sharingan picks a strange chakra pattern in the man and he instead ducks and rolls on the ground.

“You’ve got a good intuition, Sasuke Uchiha.” There is that strange gurgling laughter again. The man raises his hand, something green dripping onto his clothes and the floor. It seems to be oozing from his skin and Sasuke’s eyes narrow. “But you can’t escape forever.” A crazed smile takes over his face.

Sasuke summons a Chidori and attacks. The man is nimble and fast, but Sasuke is faster and he uses abrupt movements to derail his enemy from making any predictions about his next move. Still the green haired man laughs, and he figures that he’s a load of crazy wrapped up in a green package.

Poison flows down his hands, his face and Sasuke avoids enough spit projectiles to have him disgusted for life. He finally finds a foothold and teleports with the rinnegan, changing places with a stray kunai.

Sasuke aims a Chidori spear straight through the man, but it doesn’t go as planned. He bursts into flames - _fire clone_ – and disappears, but he laughs again, which gives Sasuke enough time to bring his sword up and deflect.

The only problem is that his grinning opponent grabs the blade and presses closer to it, green poison dripping down his teeth.

On the other side of the battlefield, Tamanegi blocks the blue haired woman’s salve of attacks and tries to think of a good plan to take her down. She is fast enough to warrant using the mangekyou sharingan, but even then the order of her movements still eludes Tamanegi.

Even worse, with every new attack she is getting closer and closer – _unnervingly_ closer. And the boy is already sweating by the time she’s throwing him backwards. He managed to nick her shoulder, but she managed to grab the chain of his weapon in retaliation and kicked him away.

He skids to a stop, face down on the destroyed floor and summons a few of Shin Uchiha’s special blades as he feigns struggling to sit up. His enemy jerks him back towards her and Tamanegi grits his teeth, angling his body and hiding the new weapons.

Blue brings him level with her face and her grin is bitingly cold. Tamanegi glares and spits blood on her face when he knees him in the gut hard enough he feels something rupture.

The woman hardly seems moved by his action though. She only brings them closer and by this time in his life Tamanegi has had enough experience with the kids in Konoha to imagine all kinds of horrible images, but the woman’s face stops a breadth away from his and she _blows air on his face_.

Air and spit and the boy might have found it in himself to gag, but his vision suddenly distorts bad enough that when Blue lets him go, he falls to his knees and really heaves the contents of his stomach onto the floor.

There is a strange sensation that keeps him there, like being on a boat in the middle of a storm while also flying through a tornado and it makes his head spin and his body immobile. He tries to sit up because despite hallucinating, his mind is still coherent enough to realize that he is in the middle of a battle.

The sharingan is useless now because whatever she did, she didn’t place any genjutsu on his mind, even though it might seem so. If the green haired man Sasuke-san is fighting with is any example, there must be poison involved.

This woman breathes poison that causes hallucinations and by the sudden wet trail on his upper lip, Tamanegi figures he doesn’t have much time left until he loses consciousness. Hopefully he won’t die, but it is certainly a high possibility now.

This poison is potent and whatever mama gave them before seems ineffective, though by the frustrated sniff Blue gives, it seems that Tamanegi was meant to be dead already.

A smile curves his lips and he sharpens his eyes into the mangekyou again and stumbles into a standing position, weapon lifted in front of him. The chain dangles loudly on the floor and the movement distracts Blue long enough to use a kawarimi, and it is just in time because the woman comes barrelling right towards him, like a tank, flattening and destroying the substituting rock.

He stumbles a few feet away and his hands form the hand seals for the katon, fixing his target only by the faint chakra trails that his sharingan detects. Tamanegi would have closed his eyes against the strange vortex images he sees now, but it would be counterproductive when he has to also use his sharingan. It is an incredibly frustrating experience.

As expected, Blue avoids the attack and lands behind him, catching him with a well-placed punch to his back and a movement that twists his arm painfully and all but dislocates his shoulder. She throws him to the other side of the hall and Tamanegi spits another mouthful of blood as he lands with enough force to form a crater.

He runs again and reaches into the pouch at his back, throwing kunai in all directions. Blue laughs and it would be a nice laugh if it wasn’t attached to such a horrible woman. Her hits come painful and heavy but Tamanegi keeps throwing kunai, and he keeps adding his own special blades through the batch.

It comes to an end with him sprawled onto his back and Blue standing over him, fist dripping with blood. His vision is still swimming, but it’s a tad better than before. Tamanegi isn’t sure if it’s a good thing or he’s on his last leg of energy and about to die. Whatever the case, the woman above him says something unintelligible because he stopped listening to her taunts two or three monologues ago.

He only uses the hand not clutching his kusarigama to form the tiger seal, activating his mangekyou and summoning back all the special blades he stole from Shin Uchiha. They generally use either a blood trail or fix on a target of Tamanegi’s choosing when he locks it with the magekyou.

This time it’s a little bit of both.

Blue seems to sense that something is wrong, but the blades cut through her before she can figure it out, deep enough that she crumbles to the floor. Tamanegi uses the last bit of his energy to roll away from his enemy, though he doesn’t stop much further away from her fallen body.

He narrows his eyes, trying in vain to see Sasuke-san’s fight, but by the sounds he hears, it is still ongoing. So, without much to do, he keeps himself occupied by counting the chain links of his weapon, replaying mama’s words in his mind that he should never fall asleep when he’s been poisoned.

Sasuke sees the kid’s sluggish movements, obviously caused by being poisoned, but at least he is still alive. His gaze returns to his opponent, a man Sasuke would have batted aside as a bothersome obstacle but finds himself presently impressed with. He’s kept up pretty well, but Sasuke would be lying if he said he didn’t prolong this fight because he wanted to see how Tamanegi would do against the blue haired woman.

And the boy defied his expectations, which is always a pleasant surprise when it happens.

Sasuke shifts his grip on his sword, sharingan and rinnegan spinning to register the fast movements of his opponent. The man seems to gear up for a huge and possibly final attack, which brings a small smile to Sasuke’s mouth. He decides on a feint as the man uses multiple clones to disorient him, but the rinnegan shows him the real one.

Sasuke easily disposes of them with a Chidori nagashi. They explode into a curtain of flames that offers him a good cover, but the green haired man also uses it. The fire parts to reveal his enemy above him, descending fast, his arms raised in front of his face.

He shouts a name of an inconsequential attack that launches a waterfall of green poison over him. Sasuke raises his arm and throws his sword before the poison hits him.

Green hair turns then, because he thinks that Sasuke has used the same teleportation technique to appear behind him, but his eyes only find the discarded weapon flying through the air. He barely has time to turn his head fully before a large arrow made of purple chakra cuts through his chest.

Poisonous goo slides off the safe cocoon of Susanoo and Sasuke watches his enemy’s eyes widen incrementally as the man realizes his mistake. But it is irrelevant now, not when Susanoo’s arrow is lodged into his chest, all his efforts wasted as Sasuke’s feint pays off.

The enemy falls to the ground, lifeless and Sasuke spares him no further glance. He instead walks to Tamanegi’s side and probes through the small pouch Sakura gave him for a syringe with the universal antidote she prepared. The boy’s protests cut short as the needle hits his skin, and it takes maybe one minute before he starts struggling to sit up.

The boy pukes whatever poison and food he had left in his stomach and Sasuke waits by his side, unsure what to do.

He’s seen Sakura deal with stuff like this, but he’s always felt awkward because there’s basically nothing to do but pat that person on the back while waiting for them to finish spilling their guts out. Still, his wife made him promise to try and establish a better relationship with the Shin brothers because even if they are not blood related, these boys still possess the sharingan and maybe some stray genes that were imbedded in Shin Uchiha and transmitted onto them. And they share the same name, though that is still unclear whether it’s a good idea or not.

But Sasuke is barely home and when he is, he prefers to spend time with his wife and daughter. This is as good an opportunity as any though, so Sasuke decides to start with Tamanegi.

He reaches out and pats the boy’s back gently, feeling more stupid by the second, though the boy does not shy away from his touch. Which comes as a surprise, because Sasuke was sure that they were kind of afraid of him, considering everything that happened with Shin Uchiha back then. He also heard whispers of gossip, from Naruto and Kakashi, of all people. Sakura would usually abstain from mentioning something like this, but her silence is as telling as any empty words of reassurance she might offer otherwise.

Tamanegi sits back on his butt, wiping his mouth with his sleeve and closing his eyes.

“That was stupid.”

Sasuke lifts an eyebrow with interest. His hand moves to grip the boy’s shoulder. It makes Tamanegi open his eyes and glance askance at him.

“I thought it was pretty good.” Which is the truth, though he never expected to share it with Tamanegi.

The boy seems shaken for a short moment, which Sasuke uses to stand up and go after his sword. He returns with it still clenched in his hand and looks down at the pale boy.

“Should I go on alone?”

Tamanegi hurries to shake his head and gets to his feet. Sasuke sees his knees shake slightly, but the boy puts on a blank façade and glances to Sasuke expectantly, waiting for him to take the lead.

Sasuke smirks and wordlessly moves away, towards the double doors lined with gold at the end of the hallway. He tells Tamanegi to stand back as he cuts the wood to pieces. It falls to the ground and reveals a few dozens of mercenaries, weapons at the ready and knees knocking onto each other as they tremble with fear.

It takes essentially one katon and a great deal of swordsmanship, but it is a good exercise.

Midohige tries to escape through a secret tunnel, but Tamanegi blocks his path and chains him up in his ridiculously large desk chair. By then, Sasuke has searched through the usual places, so he resorts to patiently asking their prisoner for the important information.

He reveals everything much too easily, but Sasuke chalks it up to him being a coward and a traitor. The hidden safe is carved into the wall, behind a wooden carving depicting a dragon that Sasuke eyes disdainfully for a full heartbeat.

There is money inside, yes, but there are also three folders with incriminating evidence, as Sasuke concludes after skimming through them. Tamanegi also returns with an armful of scrolls and papers rolled and fastened with rubber bands.

“I guess you found what you needed.” A new voice makes the boy startle, but Sasuke sensed the ANBU approach for some time now.

His eyes narrow at the Iwa sign etched into his bird mask.

“Are you the scout?”

“Yes, though it seems you have it handled.” His hand snaps out, throwing a small rock into the hallway. Sasuke watches it as it rolls steadily away from them, never quite losing its momentum and somehow keeping up its speed.

One minute later, three other ANBU arrive. One more from Iwa, one from Suna and one from Konoha. Sasuke does not know the man personally, but he has seen his file that time back then when the dobe insisted Sasuke show his opinion on the new ANBU recruits. But then Naruto hadn’t enjoyed hearing his honest opinions, which made the Uchiha wonder why in the world the idiot was so adamant of him in the first place.

“I will be safely transporting the documents you gathered back to the village.”

Sasuke ignores all the paranoid alarms that blink inside his head at the words. He is a man too used to doing everything by himself that he barely trusts others to do their jobs. But he trusts his wife, the dobe and maybe Kakashi, so he supposes that he will also trust this ANBU for the time being.

Grudgingly, he hands them over to be deposited in a storage scroll. The document is tucked into the ANBU’s jacket and the man disappears with a tight nod.

One Iwa ANBU follows, probably to oversee his safe exit out of the land of Earth. This leaves the other Iwa and the Suna ANBU watching him watch them.

“Do you need another pair of hands for clean up?”

The offer is made on a whim, because Sasuke finds himself – and Tamanegi – with nothing to do. Sakura is surely taking care of the other idiots, if the constant shaking of the building is anything to go by. And he doubts that she will appreciate him butting into her fight. Still, while he gives a hand to the ANBU, maybe he will go take a peek.

Tamanegi sways on his feet, though the boy’s face remains stubbornly set into a serious frown. Sasuke grips his shoulder and guides him out of the room, the ANBU hot on their heels.

First, they have to figure out what to do with Midohige. 

* * *

Sakura drops another scroll into the steadily growing heap over the storage scroll. She dusts her hands and rests them on her hips as her eyes search through the dimness until she finds her daughter, crouched next to another bookcase.

It’s been barely twenty minutes since they’ve infiltrated and yet Sakura has the feeling that their time is about to come to an end. They didn’t have much time to begin with, but thankfully every mad man’s archives are organized by a universal code – and that is only because somebody else, who is generally the main accountant, manages such a place in the first place. And they have a very strict order of things, one that Sakura has come to learn, applies in most cases.

The furthest shelves from the door should be the ones holding the most important documents, but in reality, they are the oldest of the lot. A lot of the newer files are right by the entrance and the most important stuff, Sakura’s gaze zeros in on the nondescript middle shelves that sit right in the middle of the bunch, are sitting right in the midst of the bunch.

If it weren’t for the worn covers, not musty with time but still more thumbed through than the newer documents, they would be unidentifiable. Thankfully, Sakura has learned to discern through these traps a long time ago.

“I think we have a lot of evidence, mama.” Sarada dumps her armful on the ground with a sigh.

Sakura’s mouth twitches into a smile, even as she raises a hand to check on her daughter. There might still be leftover symptoms from the poison and the last thing they need is for Sarada to be incapacitated in the middle of storming the enemy base.

“’m fine,” Even as she says this, Sarada pouts and crosses her arms over her chest.

“Hm, it seems you are.” Her mother agrees with levity.

Sarada turns her head to look around the room one more time as her mother starts to pack up their findings. It is nothing more than an overrated library, full of dust moths and spiders that Sarada struggled to keep away while perusing through the older shelves.

Sound echoes in this room, from one far wall to the other, and however strong their torch flares, it barely makes a dent against the encompassing darkness. It gives Sarada enough goosebumps to stay here like sitting ducks, with a light lit above their heads. But now that her mother is satisfied with what they found, they can finally get out of here for good. She can’t wait to breathe allergy-free air again.

It was too good to be true, of course it was.

Her mother hears it before her, but Sarada doesn’t take long to notice either. Sound echoes in this room, after all. And something just took a step forward in their direction.

Sarada spots her mother, crouched over a document. Her head snaps to the side and Sarada’s stomach suddenly swoops. Adrenaline courses through her veins as she watches something come hurtling towards her mother at a very high speed.

Her mouth is open in a warning scream, but then something grabs Sarada from behind and launches her towards the nearest bookcase. Her back collides painfully with the hard surface and she falls to the ground. Books shake, disturbed by the force of the hit and some tumble to the ground, hitting Sarada on the way there.

A snicker comes from above her. Sarada cracks an eye open, her tomoe spinning as they struggle to discern the appearance of her attacker. There is a human with hair as white as snow and long until it reaches the back of her knees. Her full lips are pulled into a self-satisfied smile and Sarada wonders if there’s more to it than simply being able to one up a fourteen year old still recuperating from being poisoned to death.

Sarada’s nose wrinkles as a strangely sweet smell pervades through her muzzy senses. She kind of hates it, but it’s also not exactly awful. Like one of those smells you sometimes catch and kind of tolerate because you need to, but you know you’d never voluntarily smell it again if you don’t have to.

“Come now, get up.” Her voice is dripping cold and smooth as ice. Sarada shivers. “That can’t be all you got.”

A thin kunai, thinner than normal and with a crooked handle, slips into her outstretched hand. Sarada barely rolls away in time to not get stabbed. She rises to her knees, takes one look at the incoming attack and decides that a little nick won’t do her too bad, considering that she’s pumped full of antidotes and other anti-poisonous substances because her mother won’t rest until even the memory of that poison is gone from Sarada’s system.

The knife cuts her on the cheek, a shallow wound that stings as all hell. Sarada clenches her teeth and rears her arm back. Her punch catches her enemy unprepared, but it still hits in the shoulder.

She feels the bone crack as the woman flies away and into the back of a bookcase. More dust rises and Sarada is rightly sure that this unbreathable air will be the death of her.

“You,” the white haired woman chokes and spits blood on the ground as she stumbles to her feet. She holds her side and Sarada sees that her left shoulder is clearly dislocated. A smirk stretches over her lips and the woman snarls, “will _regret_ this.”

She makes three hand seals in quick succession – ox, monkey, dragon – and then the smell from before returns full force. Sarada’s eyes widen as she looks around with her sharingan.

There are thin chakra particles in the air, dancing like dust. The smell persists, but Sarada can kind of see it now and it takes her a few more moments to realize what it is as well.

The woman takes shaky steps forward, thought she seems to be quickly regaining her composure and equilibrium.

“Now you should be nice and immobile. I wanted to take my time, but you just had to be a difficult one to play with.”

Poison, that smell is _poison_. Sarada’s brows furrow. Why would someone deliberately make a poison that is so detectable? Usually, olfactory poisons should be without smell to be the most effective.

But that would mean, her red eyes flick to her slowly advancing enemy, that she will also be affected. The poison is in the form of a perfume and its trajectory is controlled purely to protect the user.

This woman is skilled, being able to control an invisible substance like this. Sarada supposes that something close to the wind or water chakra natures must be involved.

_So if it’s poison_ , Sarada’s hands clench into fists, _and it’s made like a perfume –_ _alcohol and all_ , her eyes narrow as she thinks fast, _then it’s an easy match._

Her enemy starts running the last few meters of distance between them, obviously convinced that Sarada is now paralyzed by the poison. But there are enough anti-poison substances in her bloodstream to block a barrel of it and Sarada can move easily out of the way.

Still, she waits until the woman is on top of her and then catches her by surprise again, using another chakra enhanced punch to put her out of commission, but she only dispels a clone.

The three tomoe in her eyes spin as Sarada’s mind starts to catch up with her enemy’s next attack. The woman seemingly materializes out of thin air, and with her comes a new wave of that sickly sweet smell.

Sarada forces out a wind release – _Gale Palm_ – and sends a small gust of wind in her direction. Then her fingers fly through the seals for a katon before the other woman properly registered her first attack.

“Katon: Great Fireball!”

The woman lights up along with her deadly perfume. The fireball singes the floor, the bookcases and lights up a few, but Sarada has no qualms about property destruction right now. She doesn’t stay to see her enemy’s body fall to the ground, though she hears the sickening thud of it as she sprints towards her mother.

Unfortunately, it seems that their enemies are set in keeping them apart. A black haired man stands in her way with a wicked grin. He somewhat resembles her previous adversary and Sarada grits her teeth when he points one finger at her and his mouth curls.

“I found another Uchiha!” His voice is shockingly powerful, reverberating against the walls. “And she just killed my sister!” The tone he uses speaks of anything but sadness. “I will enjoy carving you up even more.”

The other fight – her mother, a red haired man and a yellow haired man – does not stop at his words. Even so, he does not seem to mind it.

He turns unnervingly black eyes onto her and hums under his breath as he takes one long knife out of the sheath strapped to his leg. The knife is a strange weapon with no hilt and a wide blade with sharp corners. But he still grips it like a normal knife and her adrenaline surges at the sight.

Sarada’s foot slips one half a step back.

“Where should I begin?”

* * *

Sakura heard the attack long before she saw it coming. But she also saw it – as clear as day.

A red blur that travelled towards her at an incredible speed, followed by three others.

She chalked it up to a genjutsu, but until she manages to break it, that remains to be seen.

The red haired man that attacked her has powerful punches and does not hesitate to hit where it hurts. Most possibly, they are not here to capture them. Or, more possibly, he knows very well who Sakura is and what she can do. And he doesn’t want to take his chances.

_Which is just as good_ , Sakura thinks to herself with a good dose of acrimony, _because he certainly shouldn’t_.

She won’t hold back, not when this fight must be finished as fast as possible.

She leaves the white haired woman to Sarada and concentrates on evading her three opponents’ attacks. They coordinate well, jumping and scrambling to where Sakura’s defensive counterattacks bring her.

But her daughter disposes of her adversary quickly, and it brings a smile to Sakura’s lips and a surge of pride into her system. That’s when the black haired man breaks away from formation and heads for Sarada.

The yellow haired man stands further back, as if afraid to get close, though his teammate does not seem to harbour the same uncertainties. Or maybe they are following a strategy, in which case Sakura needs to figure it out before they manage to catch her by surprise.

“Here I come!”

Sakura’s eyes narrow on the long red hair, pulled into a tight ponytail. It swirls and curves in the air as the man comes closer and closer, fist raised to strike. Sakura waits until the hand is unnervingly close to her head before her hands snap forward and she catches the man’s arm in a vice-like grip.

That’s when the yellow haired man bellows a yell to attract her attention and uses a _bazooka_ – and where he got that out from, Lord help her not know – to launch a full out missile towards them.

Her grip wavers and they both get away in time. The projectile hits the ground but instead of an explosion, there is only a cloud of dust and smoke that rises, and it leaves a gaping hole behind – large enough for the bigger yellow haired man to pass through easily.

Sakura’s eyes widen, confused as to how it did that without an explosion. She continues to deflect the incoming attacks, mind whirling with the implications. That hole is too big to not be made with anything but a bomb, but its edges are unnaturally smooth, and it shows no signs of the brute force an explosion would leave behind. Neither does it look like it was affected by any kind of smoldering heat, as it would normally happen.

_Then it’s not a bomb_ , Sakura resolutely concludes, even as she is aware that more tests are needed. Still, she must be careful of the red haired man as well. The grin over his lips never wavered from the moment his eyes fell on her and he does not hesitate to hit and hit and _hit_.

Sakura builds her own strategy as she rolls behind a few bookcases. They are promptly destroyed by the man’s bare fists. The technique is unnervingly like her own chakra enhanced punches, but something seems off.

She moves further back, picks up more bookcases and throws them at her opponent. The man punches through three of them in total, but not consecutively. No, Sakura picked and threw at least five of them, but two were destroyed by the yellow haired man with the bazooka.

It seems that whatever technique the red haired man uses, he cannot do it whenever he wishes like her. He has a lapse of a few seconds in between every movement when his companion takes point, which means that it is not a chakra enhanced punch but completely something else. 

_Or maybe it is, but he cannot control it well_.

So then, how is she going to find out?

Sakura plants her feet on the ground and narrows her eyes, silently urging the man to take the punch. He does so with incredible relish, which either makes him an idiot, or he is incredibly sure of his abilities.

Sakura takes it in stride, stopping herself from hurtling too far away. She uses her thumb to wipe the blood at the corner of her mouth and she directs her attention to the pulsing hell in her cheek.

It is fractured, but not incredibly bad.

Bruised mostly and stinging. Healing chakra is already working to heal the wound as Sakura climbs to her feet, aware that her opponent is laughing and running again towards her. But she let herself fly far enough away that she has time to prepare herself because there won’t be a second time he touches her today.

She jerks her head to the right and his fist passes by her head. His knee flies towards her abdomen, but Sakura catches it with her hands and squeezes tight.

The man yells and a satisfied smile settles over Sakura’s lips as he limps away. His teammate takes over then, launching bomb after bomb and she runs along the length of the room, avoiding them all.

That’s when she notices the pulsing stinging in her cheek, which shouldn’t be there if it was a normal wound from a punch. Her healing chakra should be smoothing it over and numbing the pain, not making it worse.

This stinging – Sakura’s eyes widen before she frowns and grits her teeth as an idea for the reason pops into her head.

One projectile lands unnervingly close to her. Sakura skids to a stop and takes in the path of destruction. It is obvious that the man will not let her get close to him, if the irregular half circle he has drawn around himself with the bombs is anything to go by.

She crouches down and drags a finger around the newest hole. It comes away covered in a powdery yellow substance that immediately starts to burn on her skin.

_Poison again,_ Sakura looks up at the two. Fitting that they would use poison in their attacks. Their employer – or whatever relation they have to Midohige – specializes in poisons. Surely he would equip his personal army with these kinds of weapons – _weapons_ that Sakura didn’t know existed, but now that she does, there is an entirely new problem in and of itself that will have to be addressed when they return to Konoha.

She avoids another three attacks, as she slowly draws the circle to a close, but not quite. She stops in front of the last stretch of untouched floor, but the man is deadest on hitting her because his finger squeezes the trigger without pause.

Sakura follows the trajectory of the projectile and when it’s close enough, she raises an arm, draws back her fist and punches against the incoming bomb. She applies a dense amount of chakra, coating both her fist and forearm in case it does explode, but also directing a condensed shockwave to counter its high speed.

The bomb disintegrates into fine particles, finer than even the powder was, and falls to the ground harmlessly. The yellow haired man is shocked into a stupor and he wastes five long seconds in his shock, seconds that Sakura uses to punch the ground, directing chakra into the stone floor so the creaks travel through the holes the poison bit into.

With a mighty groan, the floor under the yellow haired man’s feet vanishes and his dawning comprehension is the last expression he wears as he falls through and disappears into the darkness below. Sakura does not stay to watch, she runs around the large hole she created, looking for the other man, but finding him nowhere.

It takes him three whole minutes to make his appearance, and when he does it’s with a punch straight to her lower back. He materializes into one of her blind spots and Sakura is not fast enough to pull herself away.

She does not let herself skidder too far away this time. Keeping her eyes on his punches, her mind struggles to form a cohesive plan of offense, but until she has one, she punches and kicks through the floor, making the building above them shake.

Rocks fall from the ceiling and Sakura wonders how badly the structure must be damaged, but there is no way to gauge that when she can barely see her adversary through the low light and that’s mostly because his hair is a flaming red that seems to emanate light.

Now that he has no back up, he seems more set on keeping up his defence as well as his salve of attacks. His limp is still noticeable but not hindering, and Sakura wonders if he knows medical ninjutsu as well.

One thing she knows for sure is that he is getting aggravated.

“You damn-!”

And he makes the mistake to let that anger cloud his senses for a moment and let the punch fly when it is obvious that Sakura is in the position to deflect it. She doesn’t kick it away though, because her curiosity overwhelms her and the theory at the back of her mind pulses with unanswered questions.

She catches it instead and brings it close enough to her face that it’s barely a breadth away from her nose. Her red haired opponent freezes, momentarily confused by her actions. Most of the time it is a struggle to see chakra, especially when you do not hold the sharingan or the byakugan, but if she’s close enough and if she’s pushing her own chakra into his system, Sakura can construct for herself a kind of map into the nearest chakra pathways she can find.

Her eyebrows climb on her forehead at what she finds, but that is also when the man finally manages to extract his limb from her grip – which is another feat she is now convinced she figured out.

“That’s interesting,” Sakura tilts her head to the side as she watches the man’s expression twist with fury, “you have incredible chakra control.”

His glower melts into a sneer.

“Coming from someone like you, I must be honoured to hear that.”

Sakura avoids another punch, but she is too excited not to keep talking about her recent discovery. 

“Your skin is coated with poison particles so fine they are invisible.” A kick to her chest that makes her flick over his head. “And then you draw the chakra in your hand into such tiny scalpels they are actually _needles_ that pierce the skin of your opponent,” this is such an interesting technique, Sakura might just borrow it, “and inject the poison at the same time.”

The derisive glint in his gaze speaks volumes. “You sound pretty impressed, _doctor_ Uchiha. Please stop with the compliments or I might melt in a puddle of happiness!”

He ducks under her guard, kicks up and when Sakura lands exactly the way she knows he unconsciously wished for, he comes at her with another punch. Sakura catches it in her hand, putting the fight to an effective stop.

His fist trembles from exertion as he struggles to get his hand out. Sakura draws their hands away from her face, steadily ignoring the pins and needles and the slow numbness spreading from her fingers. She meets his angry gaze and speaks again.

“But you can only do it with this hand, which is why you hesitate to punch with the other. Because it’s not as powerful, it is just a normal punch.”

Rising to the challenge, he does punch her with his right hand, but she barely feels it. She easily deflects whatever kicks he aims to put and his efforts to twist out of her grip end up with her enemy in more pain than before, contorted in some uncomfortable positions.

Sakura grins. “See?”

Red hair snarls but they are out of time. Sakura spots Sarada making her way towards them, dragging her feet and keeping her left hand over a wound on her right arm, but she is otherwise unharmed.

Relieved, Sakura turns to her adversary and her grip tightens painfully. The man growls and she is impressed by the resistance he manages to put up, even in this position.

“You are powerful, so I won’t hold back.” Sakura says serenely, rearing an arm back and catching the red haired man squarely in the chest.

He flies in the large hole his companion fell through earlier and disappears.

Sakura turns and makes to go to where Sarada has sat on the ground, but her feet stumble over air. A dizzy spell overtakes her, and she grits her teeth as her vision swims and blurs.

The poison obviously managed to affect her more than she thought.

Closing her eyes in concentration, she expels the poison from her system with a jolt of chakra that comes along with her activated seal.

Her daughter is a mess when she gets to her side and Sakura cannot help but smile with amusement. Her husband’s chakra flickers somewhere up there, in the direction of the entrance.

“Let’s get out of here, sweetie.”

* * *

Sarada is savvy enough in the art of combat by now to know not to underestimate her enemies. So, when the black haired man twirls his long knife around his hand and launches it like a spear in her direction, Sarada does not dare to do anything other than throw herself to the ground and roll away from his incoming stomp.

She is still reeling from the image, trying to come up with a believable explanation as to how he’s able to hold that sharp blade in his hand and not have his skin break. Sarada sees that he is no medical ninja, not by what she manages to pick up with her bloodline limit.

She springs to her feet a few meters away, sharingan activated and a grim line to her mouth, struggling to read through his moves. But the man only takes back the knife and does that again and again and _again_ , without pause.

It’s getting to a point ten minutes full of defensive running later that Sarada’s muscles start to scream and burn from the sudden exertion. She has no choice but to continue to dodge away though because the blade is obviously poisoned and Sarada doubts that she will be able to catch him by surprise like she did to his sister earlier.

“Come now, stop running!” His teeth bare in a snarl and he flicks another knife towards her throat.

Sarada yelps and ducks, frantically trying to come up with a plan.

“Here’s perfect, sweetheart.”

The man flickers behind her and Sarada feels the need to punch him, but it won’t accomplish anything, and he will absolutely dodge. So she only raises her arms and blocks his kick that still sends her flying towards the wall of bookcases she ran close to earlier.

Her eyes widen when she spots the numerous blades stuck to the wall, glinting under the low light viciously. She’s approaching them fast, horribly fast. Sarada’s chest tightens because she can’t stop the inertia from directing her towards that spot.

“ _Shannaro!_ ” Sarada grunts through her clenched jaw and she tilts her head to the side, as much as she can. The earlier image she memorized with the sharingan directs her arm at a sixty degree angle and her left leg to fold in on itself.

Her body slides through a gap between the blades perfectly. Her arm surrounds one of them, her left foot rests on another and her neck is a breath away from the third closest one. Blood drips from a cut on her neck, but it is shallow. And after so much accumulated experience with the substance, Sarada can discern the sting of the poison as it enters her bloodstream.

She prays that her mother’s medicine is still active inside her body as she carefully disentangles from the dangerous wall of blades.

“Nicely dodged!” The black haired man lands not far away from where she’s standing. A frown mars his face, but he barely seems affected. Another blade slips over his knuckles casually. “Let’s see how long you can keep up.”

Sarada leans to the side as another blade comes and buries itself in the veritable collection behind her.

This man uses a strange jutsu, Sarada thinks as she continues to dodge and deflect with her own kunai. She cannot see any places on his person to store weapons, but he doesn’t seem to ever run out of knifes. It might be a storage seal, but he might also be using a multiplying technique because these are definitely not shadow clones.

Taking another glance at the side of the room they transformed into their battlefield, she sees a field of sharp blades. They are so many already, she doesn’t remember dodging so many.

Sarada weaves out of his reach and then returns his kick with a well-aimed punch that manages to throw him backwards a few paces. He glances down where she punched, doubles over and spits out blood. But he remains standing and when he looks up at her with a grin, his eyes hold an unnatural glint in them that makes Sarada takes a step back.

“Now we’re talking, girlie.”

He approaches faster than before, but Sarada has somewhat figured what she has to do so she jogs out of his way, a hand blindly searching through her pouch for her roll of wire.

A stream of blades follows, snapping at her heels as she weaves through the weapons on the ground. Sometimes she comes ridiculously close to losing a limb, but her reflexes kick in and she gets out of the way in time.

Her jaw clenches, and she pushes herself to run faster, to encompass as much of the dreary battlefield as she can until he figures it out or whatever energy reserve she summoned before runs out. Still, despite her best efforts, there are numerous cuts on her person when she emerges from the field of blades.

The man lands on two of his weapons perfectly and he crouches down with a strange expression over his face.

“I don’t want to have to kill you so quickly, you know? But running away will get you there.”

“Then I won’t run away!”

Sarada makes the stupid decision to use one of the blades to give herself a boost in her jump, but she does not expect the weapon to be so sharp that it cuts through her sandal like butter and bites into her sole. Sarada swallows back the pained cry and struggles to direct her mind to the rapidly incoming enemy.

She lifts her injured leg, figuring that it’s better to kick with it than to _land_ on it with all her weight.

The man does not hesitate to jump forward, out of her reach. Her kick makes a good dent in the battlefield, and Sarada is happy to see that the blades are not immune from such an attack. She gets a few cuts that distract her long enough that she barely has time to defend herself against the black haired man’s next attack. His blade carves a deep cut through her right arm and this time a whimper of pain does manage to escape through her teeth.

The man laughs.

“I think this is enough.”

Sarada grins and it takes him aback. “Oh, I agree.”

Her hands secure the wire around his neck and arm with a tight knot that he notices a little too late. Sarada concentrates and directs lightning release chakra through the conductive wire. It travels in a second and descends to the blades surrounding them, creating a perfect circuit.

She barely manages to get out of there before the lightning intensifies as it travels through the metal. Light washes over her face for a long while until the chakra expends itself and dies away, leaving a charred body to fall to the ground.

“I think I’ve had enough of poison to last a lifetime.” Sarada whispers, urging herself on towards where she can faintly see the outline of her mother.

Mama is still fighting, judging by the sounds and the shakes that the strange bombs make as they fall through the floor.

Sarada limps through a violent earthquake that can only be a creation of her mother. Her shoulders droop with relief when she gets close enough to see that her mother is alright and just finishing up her fight.

Not wanting to be in the way, Sarada drops down and rests her back against the side of a bookcase that has miraculously remained upright. She breathes through the pain, but at least there are no more poison aftereffects that she experiences.

There is only the good old pain of stepping over an unsheathed blade like an idiot. Her hand clenches around the wound on her right arm, trying in vain to stop the heavy flow of blood.

Mama drops to her knees next to Sarada a whole five minutes later with a laugh that causes Sarada to glare at her.

“Let’s get out of here, sweetie.”

Her mother salvages what she can. The storage scrolls are pretty hard to find through the mess and the darkness, but mama manages to find three out of five, which is better than Sarada ever expected.

“Can you stand up, Sarada?”

The girl struggles to her feet and nods, trying to keep her trembling knees from knocking into one another while she walks. They break back on the surface with a powerful chakra enhanced jump. Sarada’s hands tighten their hold on her mother’s neck, her gaze drawn to the black hole they just used as an exit.

“Sarada,” her mother quips, slightly out of breath and Sarada’s head turns in alarm. But her mother only smiles with mirth and says, “not so tight, honey.”

Papa and Tamanegi are in front of the entrance, along with a team of two ANBU, one from Iwa and one from Suna. Tamanegi is leaning against her father’s side, half slumped and Sarada definitely sympathizes with him in that moment.

She barely hears the ANBU’s words and her mother’s grumbles that she won’t just up and dump the documents in their arms. Papa says something then, but the only thing Sarada sees is black as she stumbles behind her mother.

She closes her eyes and rests her burning forehead against the cool material of her father’s cloak.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i had to beta the chapter but then i didn't  
> which is why this chapter is so late but what can you do  
> pretty big final chapter and then one epilogue and i can't believe i actually managed to hit the random chapter count i set out for this story


	12. Day 24

* * *

**_Sarada's tip:_ ** _Upon returning home, make sure to bring as many souvenirs as you can handle._

_But if you are caught up in an international incident and you have no chance of doing that - make sure to come back prepared with a lot of awesome stories._

* * *

Tsunade taps her fingers on the unfurled scrolls draped across the desk.

The laboratory is in a state of chaos, with its personnel running around from one side to the other, equipment to equipment. Colorful vials are transported between them for poison vivacity measurement without much regard for lab safety anymore – not when national safety is concerned – and the former Hokage sits in the middle of the mess at a hastily acquired desk from somewhere else in the hospital.

Sakura only needs to take one close look at it to realize that the desk might as well be pulled from her office.

“The information in those files was incredibly useful.” Her former master begins, and Sakura catches her gaze because the longer she looks at that desk, the more the possibility of an aneurism is getting closer, considering the pulsing vein in her temple. “Kiri has already started mass testing and we are pulling our own weight. I estimate it to be ready for the first human tests tomorrow morning.”

Sakura clears her throat before asking.

“What about the documents? What decision did the Kage take?”

“After a thorough study of their contents, they will be taken to the Land of Iron. Their safekeeping has been entrusted to the samurai.”

Sakura nods, satisfied that such an important decision could be reached so rapidly. Now there is only one more thing to do in order for this mission to reach a satisfying end – it is time to save Konohagakure’s citizens from a poisonous death.

“Then allow me to assist you in developing the antidote, shishō.”

Tsunade’s mouth perks into a smile, though there is concern swimming behind her gaze.

“I thought you’d want to spend some time with your family after such a trying mission.”

To the older woman’s surprise, her student throws her head back and laughs shortly.

“I think I spent quite a bit of quality time with my family, Tsunade-sama.” Sakura shakes her head affectionately. “Now I’m here to fulfill my duty as the head of Konoha’s hospital.”

“Fair enough, Sakura. Keep in mind that I asked first, so your damn husband better not show up at my door with a scowl on his face and demand to pull you from your upcoming thirty six hour shift.” Tsunade scowls, as if she can pinpoint a number of such instances in their past.

Sakura giggles, long used to such a thing and turns up her sleeves to get to work.

* * *

Sasuke stops in the middle of the forest and turns his eyes to the sky, but he finds nothing there.

No hawk, no message, no imminent crisis.

He shakes his head slightly, considering the possibility that what he felt was just a cold wisp of air, somehow more potent than the others on this high mountain peak.

The group of ANBU he joined has been travelling at high altitudes ever since they split from the main squad.

Sasuke didn’t want to leave Sakura and Sarada to return in Konoha by themselves. But there was need of his skills here, with the mixed ANBU coalition tasked to rat out whatever other holes Midohige’s associates might use as hideouts. It did help that there was a compelling list of such places in the many pages they recovered, ready to be put to good use.

“Something wrong?” Sai asks from behind his mask.

Sasuke shakes his head and slowly looks back to the ground. Only Sai stopped when he did, the rest continuing onwards to the third hideout and the last for the day.

Pursing his lips, the Uchiha rests his hand on the hilt of his sword and offers a nod, signalling that it is time to go.

To his credit, Sai only follows in his footsteps and doesn’t insist.

Despite the smothering cold, Sasuke lets his mind wander back to Konoha and allows himself to get lost in the sound of the crunching leaves beneath their feet.

* * *

“But man, you really did a number out there, believe it!” Uncle Naruto leans back in his chair.

Through the windows behind him, Konohagakure continues to mind its own business. Life has returned to a slight shadow of its former self with the provisional antidote fully integrated into the water system. The science and development division continues to keep its eye on the water quality with the help of the kit of tests supplied by Kiri and her mother and aunt Tsunade must be working on the real deal treatment right about now.

“You decimated that guy’s hideout, must’ve been fun.” The Hokage trails off into a despondent grumble.

Sarada watches the scene with a mixture of amusement and uncertainness, hiding a snicker by biting her lower lip and looking down. She stands before her uncle’s desk as Lord Seventh reads through the report mama handed her with the instruction to get it to uncle Naruto at once.

“Whew, those guys seemed pretty dangerous.”

Sarada shifts on her feet, unsure if she is supposed to say something or not to these little comments he is throwing around while he reads what papa and mama wrote. Usually, he doesn’t do that, but on this occasion, he seems incredibly invested in the course of events.

“Uh, Lord Seventh?”

Sarada gently prods and the Hokage startles and looks up at her with a bit of worry.

“You seemed to get the full poison treatment on this mission. You okay?”

Sarada grimaces, but she nods.

The room descends into silence once again before uncle Naruto breaks it. His tone is amicable and light, even as he handles a large folder over his desk, its form bulging with files. He drops it with a loud bang on his desk. His grin is conspiratorial when he asks with a wink.

“So, c’mon! Tell me how it _really_ was.”

Sarada offers a small smile, now that she understands what kind of explanations he was fishing for. She relates all the events, adding small details here and there when the moment calls for it. But other than that, Sarada keeps onto what her parents wrote in their report, certain that they spared no important event they went through.

“Hm! Sounds like you had fun.”

Sarada’s head tilts in confusion at his words. She wouldn’t define her string of near-death experiences as exactly fun, _but_.

She closes her eyes and thinks about it.

Well, it _was_ fun. Being with her parents and showing off her hard work and training. Even Tamanegi ended up becoming a tolerable human being for once. She absently wonders whether the boy is still in the hospital or if he went back to the orphanage.

“Yeah, it was.”

Sarada finally agrees as she opens her eyes. Even with the waves of nausea she still experiences. Even if her stomach heaves every time she thinks of approaching any other food than rice and vegetables. The effects of the large doses of poison she’s been afflicted with are still present within her system, but otherwise she is fine. And the girl doubts that her mother will let her be anything but completely fine.

“Fun.”

The word seems like a secret password that brings the Hokage to offer her a big toothy smile and an approving nod.

“I’m glad to hear that!”

Sarada notices her uncle deflate on the spot and she figures that he is still firmly swarmed by paperwork and a hundred other things to do in order to make everything go back to normal. It must not be pleasant, but if it keeps everyone happy and safe, then this is all that matters.

Sarada has no doubt that being Hokage is a hard job to handle, but this is why she wants to do it all the more. To protect everyone and make sure that they are fine, especially after such an awful ordeal.

She makes a mental note to ask Boruto and Mitsuki how life was in the middle of everything. Choco must have a thousand stories waiting for her already.

Sarada smiles widely, full of the amusement Naruto doesn’t quite feel anymore. She stands in front of his desk, hands folded behind her and back ramrod straight as she intones.

“I did my best, Lord Seventh!”

“That’s– I told you that it’s _uncle_ _Naruto-_!”

Naruto all but swallows back his words because that’s when he finally spots it. Under that dark Uchiha appearance and Sakura’s sweet features that soften whatever they can of his stupid best friend’s genes, there is a fire. A fire that burns bright and hot. It feels almost scorching when he mentally reaches out to it, but its edges are dull and mellow, caressing at a touch.

Sarada burns, a bright star of the Uchiha clan in the making, but unlike her father, she does not threaten to tear it all away. No, Naruto sees that she can build many wonderful things with it.

Whatever convoluted feelings swim through his chest slowly filter out and the fight goes out of him, because what’s the point?

Neither Sakura-chan nor the bastard will listen to his complaints anyway – that is, considering he can catch them without using an ANBU squad to do the deed – and Sarada manages to awe him with just a smile.

The Hokage releases a sound between a groan and a tired sigh.

_This family is going to be the death of me._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> right so, late but at least it's here!   
> ... i had to rewrite the ending because something did not sit right with me  
> so here it is, the last installment and just in time for ss month to end! i'm pretty proud that i was able to accomplish this 
> 
> anyways,
> 
> i just wanted to take a minute to thank everyone who read and commented on the story. you guys are amazing and i'm really happy that you enjoyed my story as much as i enjoyed writing it!


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